Here’s our second instalment of our twelve part series of short how-to blog posts. We previously looked at how to merge author names in Mendeley Desktop. This time, we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to download a file directly into Mendeley by simply dragging and dropping a PDF link into the desktop application.
One of the easiest actions you can perform on any computer is the drag & drop. Select a file, drag it over a folder and that’s it. No copy, no paste, no command line, no nada. Drag and drop, virtual physical file manipulating joy.
To make things even easier to import files into Mendeley, you can simply drag and drop a (directly accessible) link for a PDF document in your browser directly into Mendeley Desktop and it will be downloaded and incorporated into your library. That’s right. Take a look at the following short video:
Although this is a great trick, it doesn’t necessarily work well with all browsers. However, I’ve tried it with Firefox and it’s worked quite well.
In our next quick how-to entry we’ll be looking at BibTeX in Mendeley Desktop.
Previous How-to series entries:
Mendeley Blog 
That’s nice, but…
Please make it possible to drag and drop a PDF file already on my computer to link it to a paper already in my Mendeley desktop library. We’ve been asking for this for years.
Can you do a video of how to use the shared space. My private space is all filled up and would like to shift some of them to the shared space.
David, does the duplicate detection tool not match the paper entries in Mendeley with and without PDFs linked? You should be able to merge those leaving you with only one entry, with the PDF attached. If not, would you please email support with a description of the problem and some example papers?