Here we are, at the halfway point of our twelve-part how-to blog series. This one will be another quick look at something our members sometimes don’t realize. Your library can contain more than just references and PDFs!
There are nearly a dozen different ways to add references to your Mendeley library. Reference entries can have a file associated with them or not. In other words, your entries can be just document details or also contain the respective PDF, Word, PPT or other document format.
One thing that many don’t realize is that you can actually have multiple documents attached to a single reference entry. A good and recurring example of this is having a reference with attached PDF and supplementary data files. Useful, right? I know!
Here’s how you add multiple documents to a single references:
- Click on an entry in your library.
- Look at the right-hand panel which contains the document details
- Scroll down to where the attachment field is.
- Attach one or multiple documents to that entry. Done.
You will notice that the entry in your library will show a different icon from the entries with one or no attached documents.
Previous How-to series entries:
Mendeley Blog 
So long as the supplementary files can’t get a clear identifying name, this is a very problematic feature.
One way of doing this would be to have a drop-down menu next to each file that will allow you to choose a sort of label (“notes”, “data”, “presentation”, “image” or whatnot), and that label will both appear next to the file in Mendeley, and be appended to the actual file’s name in the file system. I’m sure you can think of an even better UI – anything is better than the current system…
I agree with Dubi. This feature is nothing to shout about does actually cause problems. As digital supplemental files become more and more common there needs to be a way to separate the different types of content (or at least keep the main article separate from all other attached content).
I would also like to be able to give different names to the different files associated with one reference or to label them as the other commenters suggest. Additionally I would like to be able to control which one opens by default. Sometimes I will select a reference from the main interface and one of the supplementary PDFs will open by default, when the behavior I want is for the actual article to open. A simple check box for default file to open for a given reference would work.
That said I think this is a great feature and use it all the time. Thanks Mendeley!
Yes, just wanted to add my voice to the two comments above, totally agree with them… It’s so annoying to click in the icon in the articles list and have supplementary data open etc… I love Mendeley, but I really wish you guys were faster to correct “bugs” like these, especially were they seem easy to fix as suggested Dubi…
Thanks for the feedback, folks! We love to hear what y’all are thinking, even if it’s about something that’s bothering you.
As Dubi knows, and as you can probably guess, our bug tracker is thousands of items long. This means that many obvious and easy fixes just don’t make it onto the list of fixes for each release, but the good news is that we release new versions often, so if your desired fix doesn’t make it this time, you only have to wait a few weeks for the next release. We also spend a lot of effort thinking of how to design the architecture so that it fixes whole classes of bugs at once. Long term, we hope to be able to open source the client code so that if you don’t like something, you can just submit the patch yourself.
In the meantime, the best way of getting your feedback translated into work items is to ask a question or send us a message via our support site.
Hi, any updates regarding client code open source?
Even though I am w aware that managing such a thing as mendeley must be a lot of work I also have needs regarding my work and I would be glad to fix some of the bugs I have encountered myself and submit it to mendeley or to anyone unable to fix it.
I don’t really get why every comment is only about complaining… mendeley is, of course, not perfect but still it remains a powerfull tool that helped me a lot in the past. Even though I am not using it as much as I used to I thinks it’s great to have tutorail like this serie. Thank you.
Why can not we drag the file to the position of the reference？
Mendeley has many frustrating glitches with citations and bibliography. Scholars often use books that are translated. There is no field in the details section of Mendeley to add a translator. Is there a way to customize the details section where we can checkmark various sections that we want to have in our lists? This way a “translated by” section would not be clutter for those who don’t use it, but available for those who do. If I add it to the book title, then it shows up in italics which is wrong according to APA6. The only thing that seems to work is to put it in the city section. So, for example, . But this fills up my city drop down list with many one time entries, which is annoying. Also, I am constantly needing to add page numbers into my citations , but as soon as I do this, the citation forces me to go manual with several extra clicks to get rid of pop-up windows and then the citation loses functionality as a citation (I can’t change all citations to, say, MLA without missing all of these). Also, I often have to cite several authors in one citation chain, which requires me to likewise go manual with a frustrating series of steps to get rid of brackets, stop it from always jumping to highlight the entire citation, and so forth. Also, the plug-in does not format multiple author with the same first author citations properly, so if I want , the format of the second citation will be which is wrong, and misleading. Additionally, if I have the same authors but different years it doesn’t always put in the a or b to differentiate (Smith 2012a; Smith 2014b). And any changes I make to the bibliography are reset when I re-open the document (anything I manually enter disappears). Also, as many other posts indicate, there is no easy way to cite book reviews. A way of customizing this top drop down list for each user would be helpful. That I can hide “Bill” and others which I never use, and show “Book Review” which I often use. The whole experience is frustrating on many such details. Could you write a blog post on how Mendeley suggests that users deal with such glitches? I think that many will just stop using Mendeley if our grades in courses suffer and publication are rejected because of multiple errors which make the author (me) look careless. Frustrated users will be quick to jump to the first company that solves the many glitches and allows for an experience of software saving our time and frustration rather than software wasting our time and causing frustration.