Month: April 2012

How-to series: How to merge contiguous citations with word plugin [part 9 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal1 Comment

One of the great built-in features in Mendeley is without a doubt the citation plugin for your word processor of choice. We currently support most of popular word processors such as MS word (Mac and Windows), OpenOffice, Neo Office, and Libre Office. We’re continuously working to improve the efficiency and general user interface of this plugin because we feel it is an important component within Mendeley Desktop and your overall research workflow.

That being said, I’d like to touch on a small aspect that many Mendeley citation plugin users are probably unaware of. If you add multiple citations at the same time, the appropriate citation style is used for such situations. For example, if you were citing 3 articles and they were the 3rd, 4th and 5th citations added, they’d probably be added as follows 3-5 (if using a numeric inline citation style format like “Nature Genetics”.). However, if you went in to the document and wanted to add another reference in that bundle, it would show up as 3-5 6. That is not good.
Quick solution? Delete the citations and add all four together. Which would mean remembering which reference they were, selecting all four and adding them in again.

Better solution? Merge the citations! Just select the 3-5 and 6 citation and then go to your citation plugin options in your word processor and select Merge citations. The end result should be 3-6. No need to go track down the references again. Just select, merge. Done.

Check out this quick 2 minute video showcasing our Word plugin:

Here are the previous eight entries in our How-to series:

[UPDATED] Librarians and Info Sci Professionals! Join our intro session on Mendeley on Tuesday May 1st at 2 PM EDT – See a demo of the Mendeley Institutional Edition

drgunn

Calling all librarians and information science professionals! Come learn about how researchers at your institution are using Mendeley and how you can use it to help patrons find what they’re looking for faster. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we’ll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as:Read More »

How-to series: How to export your annotations (alone or with your PDF) [part 8 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal7 Comments

In the eighth entry to our How-to series, we look at the built-in PDF viewer within Mendeley Desktop.
We (and many others) think that Mendeley is a great tool to organize your research documents. It’s also a great application to allow you to read, annotate and highlight your PDFs too! The built-in PDF viewer allows multiple open documents, highlighting, post-it-like note taking and more.
If you double-click an entry for which you have the PDF document available, you will then be able to view the document in the built-in PDF reader. You can have multiple PDFs open simultaneously, each in their own tab. Like most PDF viewers, you have the general tools that allow you to pan, zoom, read in full screen, etc. You can also annotate these documents. Highlight by selection, or by adding boxes. Add post-it-like notes in localized sections of the article and even leave article wide notes in the box in the right-hand panel.
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Transforming Scholarly Search with Mendeley: Your help needed!

drgunn1 Comment

Changing how research is done is a very big task, and we can’t do it alone. We’re particularly appreciative of our development partners who are working with us to chip away at the problems hindering research efficiency today. One problem is sifting through the volume of search results to find the most important and timely results. Jason Priem of Total Impact is working on this problem at the School for Information Science at the University of North Carolina. He and his colleagues are doing a study to determine if scholarly search can be improved by personalizing search results based on the previous reading history of the scholar — that’s where you come in. If you’re willing to share your academic search and paper reading history to improve science, sign up for his study!
Read More »

How-to series: How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog) [part 7 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal1 Comment

As you probably know that, whenever you add a document to your Mendeley library, the document details for that entry are aggregated into our Mendeley databases so as to allow you to easily synchronize your library across multiple platforms. These aggregated data are also used to generate our extensive and multidisciplinary research catalog that is continually growing, fueled by the ongoing uploading of references to your (and everyone else’) library.

This is all good and well but how about documents you don’t want to include in the catalog, or you don’t think are actually useful for others to have access via the research catalog? For those cases, we have a checkbox in the Document Details panel that allows you to keep that entry from being aggregated. It will still be synchronized across your multiple devices, but it will not have the Document Details aggregated to our research catalog.
There are plenty of situations where this can be useful. Notes from a class that you are storing and don’t believe are useful for others, manuscripts you are currently working on and therefore are still incomplete, etc.

In summary, if you’re adding a document and you don’t want the document details to be anonymously aggregated and made available for search in our research catalog, then go ahead and click on the “Unpublished work” checkbox in the Document Details panel on the right.

Unpublished Work Checkbox (in Mendeley Desktop)

There you go, simple stuff once again. In our next entry we’ll be touching on the topic of annotations.

Here are the previous six entries in our How-to series: