Last week, in collaboration with Elsevier’s Guide for Authors team, we quietly rolled out a small, but worthwhile improvement for authors who use Mendeley, and who are submitting to Elsevier journals.

When viewing the ‘Guide for Authors’ page on an Elsevier journal site, the section on how to format your references now contains a link that will install the correct citation style for that journal in Mendeley Desktop, in a single click!

This is available today for 1673 Elsevier Journals.  You can see an example on the European Journal of Radiology, or try it for yourself directly: Use APA 6th in Mendeley.

Even for journals where authors are free to use any reference style at submission (and Elsevier will then ensure the correct style is used in the published article), if it is easy enough for authors to use the right style at submission, many authors will just do that. The one click reference style incorporation into Mendeley as described above achieves that ease of use.

Creating these links

While we’ve rolled this out with Elsevier Journals initially, anyone who gets submissions of papers with certain reference style guidelines can create and distribute one-click citation style install links for Mendeley.

Currently, the links only works with styles from the citationstyles.org project (see the repository of styles on GitHub). To create one of these links, you first need a citation style’s unique ID.  The style repository contains the list of available citation styles, some are in the main folder, and many are in the ‘dependent’ folder.

Click on the filename of the style you want to link to. The unique ID is the part that is highlighted in blue below.

Simply construct the Mendeley link using the following format:
http://open.mendeley.com/use-citation-style/[unique-id-of-style]

So for the above example, the final link would look like:
http://open.mendeley.com/use-citation-style/clinical-orthopaedics-and-related-research

That’s it 🙂 Test it yourself first to check that it works before distributing the links, but feel free to use these links on your journal or departmental webpages.