Category: research tutorials

Tips and tricks using Mendeley. Infos related to getting started with Mendeley and explore all available features.

By popular demand: teaching materials

Jan Reichelt2 Comments

Since many of you have asked for it (and because we thought it was a good idea anyway), we’ve increased our efforts in developing support and documentation materials for Mendeley. For example, some users (especially librarians) wanted to give a presentation about Mendeley at their institution, or asked for some written documentation about how to use Mendeley.

Currently, we are working on both a new support section and on some updated about pages. Today however, as a little appetizer, we proudly present our new and fresh teaching materials! You can use them to learn more about Mendeley’s features, or you can use them to spread the word about Mendeley by giving a presentation at your institution or department/lab by simply forwarding the materials to your colleagues, other researchers, and students.

  • Getting Started Guide: The Getting Started Guide shows you how to use Mendeley’s basic features. It is also bundled together with each Mendeley Desktop installation. You can download the document here (size: 1 MB).
  • Teaching Presentation: You can spread the word about Mendeley at your institution using our Teaching Presentation (feel free to adapt the presentation to your needs). It shows both Mendeley’s vision and how to use the features of Mendeley Desktop and Web. Get the Adobe PDF (size: 4 MB) or the Powerpoint PPT (size: 22 MB) file.
  • Mendeley Fact Sheet: For a quick overview of Mendeley’s features, have a look at our Fact Sheet. On just two pages, it describes what Mendeley is, and it’s easy to forward. You can download the Fact Sheet here (size: 2 MB).
  • Mendeley Poster: Finally, didn’t you dream of having a Mendeley poster next to your Albert Einstein one? Here it is, put it on your wall or the notice board of your university. Enjoy it here (A4, size: 0.5 MB) or download the larger one (A3, size: 1 MB).

Soon, you’ll also be able to download these teaching materials from our updated web pages. A big thank you to Aladin, one of our great Mendeley interns, and Ricardo, one of our community liaisons!

CiteULike and Mendeley collaborate – it’s live!

Jan Reichelt5 Comments

Roughly three and a half months after our announcement that we would plan to collaborate with CiteULike it’s even better news to announce that the first step is live – Mendeley users can now access their CiteULike data from within Mendeley. As we said in our previous blog post,

Your CiteULike account will show up as a “Document Group” in our Mendeley Desktop software, thus making your CiteULike metadata available to you in a desktop interface – from where you can manage them offline or insert citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word, for example.

Follow these steps to activate the integration of CiteULike with Mendeley:

  • On your settings page, scroll to the bottom and enter your CiteULike username. Then click OK, and allow any pop-up blocking messages displayed by your browser — if any.
  • You will be taken to an activation message on CiteULike’s site — confirm this action.
  • This will take you to your Edit Profile page with a check-box displayed next to Enable Mendeley. You will find this at the bottom of the form, highlighted. Click Update Profile to save this.
  • You will now see your CiteULike profile page. Don’t worry if you don’t see any confirmation — this is normal. The synchronization is now set up successfully.

You can enable, or disable, Mendeley synchronization by going to your Edit Profile page on CiteULike, and checking, or unchecking, the check-box labelled Enable Mendeley. If you don’t login to Mendeley once every 30 days, this sync will be disabled. You can re-enable it by re-checking this box.

This is obviously just a first step – together with the guys at CiteULike we are now working on a two-way synchronization. Our reference manager Mendeley Desktop now already offers a wide selection of import/export options (plus a Web Importer to grab citations off the web), and if you have any additional suggestions or comments, have your say on our feedback page.

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HOWTO: Mendeley on OS X/Linux/Toaster

Mike Arthur7 Comments

Update: We now have native versions for Windows, OS X and Linux, so I have crossed out the instructions on how to run Mendeley using WINE and Darwine. The instructions for running Mendeley on your toaster remain valid.

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[June 13, 2008]: My name is Mike and I’m a software engineer. No, I won’t fix your computer. However I will get Mendeley running on it because you’re such a nice person.

I’m hard at work at the moment making Mendeley work on Linux. For those who care this involves moving from a Visual Studio based build-system to one using CMake and also fixing some of the inane rubbish that the the MSVC++ compiler seems to think should be valid C++.

At the moment you can use WINE on Linux/FreeBSD, Darwine on Apple OS X and Mendeley-shaped bread in your toaster to fulfil all your unsated academic document management needs.

Running Mendeley on Apple OS X

  • Install Darwine from http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/ into the Applications directory.
  • Install TRiX from http://mike.kronenberg.org/?p=69 into the Applications directory.
  • Run TRiX from Applications.
  • Make sure the following options are selected: In the “General” tab: “MS Arial, Courier, Times fonts“, “MS Tahoma font (not part of corefonts)”. In the “Libraries & Runtimes” tab: “vc6redist from VS6sp4 (mfc42, msvcp60, msvcrt)”
  • Press the “Install” button.
  • When done (i.e. Terminal displays “All done, no errors”) install Mendeley (double click on .exe file – Darwine will do the rest. Allow it to install into the default directory: i.e. “C:Program FilesMendeley Beta”). If “All done, no errors” did not appear then try and click “Install” again until it does.
  • Open a new Terminal.
  • Run the following commands: “cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Mendeley Beta/; /Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin/wine Mendeley.exe“
  • The last command should have launched Mendeley! If it didn’t or you are having any other problems then post them here and we’ll try and help.
  • KNOWN Problems: Depending on your language, “Program Files” may be something like “Programme” instead. If the above command doesn’t work then try to run “ls ~/.wine/drive_c/” and use the results to see where you should “cd” to.

Running Mendeley on Linux/FreeBSD/BeardOS

  • Install Wine from your package manager.
  • Download Winetricks from http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks.
  • When downloaded run “sh winetricks” from a terminal, when in the same directory as Winetricks.
  • Select “allfonts” and “vcrun6” and press “OK“. Press “OK” when the VC6 installer pops up.
  • When done (i.e. the terminal displays “All done, no errors”) run “wine Mendeley-0.5.4.0.exe” when pointing at the correct downloaded installer and change the version number to be correct. Allow it to install into the default directory: i.e. “C:Program FilesMendeley Beta”).
  • Run the following commands: “cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Mendeley Beta/; wine Mendeley.exe“
  • The last command should have launched Mendeley! If it didn’t or you are having any other problems then post them here and we’ll try and help.
  • KNOWN Problems: Depending on your language, “Program Files” may be something like “Programme” instead. If the above command doesn’t work then try to run “ls ~/.wine/drive_c/” and use the results to see where you should “cd” to.

Running Mendeley on your Toaster

  • Get a piece of Bread.
  • Cut the piece of Bread into the shape of the Mendeley logo.
  • Insert into Toaster and set heat to at least 5.
  • Wait patiently for the Toast (toasted bread) to pop out of the toaster.
  • Optional step: Use a Knife and a Spread (any bread-compatible spread will do) and combine them on the toast.
  • Consume the toast.
  • The last command should have launched Mendeley made you less hungry! If it didn’t or you are having any other problems then post them here and we’ll try and help.