Tag: Metadata

How-to series: How to add supplementary data to references [part 6 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal9 Comments

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:

  1. Click on an entry in your library.
  2. Look at the right-hand panel which contains the document details
  3. Scroll down to where the attachment field is.
  4. 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:

How-to series: How to check for duplicate entries and merging [part 4 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal7 Comments

Here goes the fourth entry of our twelve-part how-to series. Let us take a look at how you to look for duplicate entries and merging whenever we do come across repeat entries.

As your reference library grows, it can happen that you add the same research article to your library more than once. Sometimes you’ll have a preprint and the final published example added. In general, Mendeley does its best to avoid having duplicate entries in your library and will tend to merge entries when they have the exact same metadata. However, every now and then some research articles make it in twice with minor differences between them that Mendeley Desktop can’t detect immediately. For these cases, you can go ahead and use the deduplication tool.

This tool, is quite self explanatory, however there are some details you may want to take note of: 1) it’s context specific. Meaning that it will only look for duplicates within the collection or folder you have currently selected; 2) It provides you with the option to select the document details you want to keep from each of the duplicates, thus allowing to maximize the completeness of your documents’ details;

So how do you use the deduplication tool? Here’s a quick run-down:

  1. In Mendeley Desktop, select the folder which you’d like to search for duplicates. It can be “All Documents”, a specific folder or even a sub-folder.
  2. Go to you Tools menu and select Deduplication tool.
  3. You will see a listing of the duplicates found (if any!). Select the one you’d like to examine and notice the checkboxes next to the document details in the right-hand panel.
  4. Select the details that you would like to keep from each of the documents.
  5. Click merge to stay with one only merged entry containing the complete document details in your library only once.
  6. Select the next duplicate set of references and repeat steps 3-5.

Here are a couple short videos exemplifying how this feature works. Nothing like an organized library of references, huh?

How to find duplicates:

How to merge duplicate entries:

Our next entry will show you how to quickly copy and paste formatted citations anywhere!

Previous How-to series entries:

An organized folder is a sign of a… file organizer

Ricardo Vidal17 Comments

As a PhD student I find myself roaming the Internet quite a bit in search of literature for my research project which can be really time consuming. Looking for the right keywords, opening each relevant result into a new tab, downloading each paper of interest, finding the cryptically named PDF file and then adding it to your library in an organized fashion (phew). So anything that can cut back this strain of accessing and organizing research papers is most welcome.

In previous posts I’ve mentioned Mendeley’s web importer, which helps retrieve papers directly to your Mendeley Web account. That’s all good, but what about papers that you already have on your computer spread about in different folders or hard drives?

There are multiple ways to import files from your hard drive directly into Mendeley Desktop. You can add one file at a time, a full folder in one go or even make a specific “Watched” folder.

A “Watched” folder is basically a folder that Mendeley keeps an eye on for any new files and automatically imports new documents with minimal interaction on your behalf. Just drop or download your PDF documents into your watched folder and Mendeley will do it’s thing (I mean auto-extract it’s metadata and add it to your library!).

So we now have a web importer for online retrieval and an automated watch folder. Looks like we are set!

My references and documents are all nice and organized within Mendeley Desktop and accessible online but when I look at the files on my computer, I notice something. In fact, I notice the lack of something: meaningful file names.

Filename Mystery

As you can see in the image above, the file names are not very explanatory and whenever I have to pick a file to send to a colleague or open it directly for some reason, it becomes a guess-the-mystery-file name game. Not to mention that every time I add a file to that folder with a similar name, I get this fantastic message:

The file you are trying to copy “sdarticle.pdf” already exists. Cancel or overwrite?

Good question, do I want to overwrite sdarticle.pdf? Do I have any idea what is in that file? The most probable answer to both these questions is no. Once again, Mendeley has considered this situation and provides an effortless way to organize your files with a built-in feature called: ‘File Organizer’.

As the name suggests, this feature can organize your files for you in a few different ways. You can store your files in a centralized folder with all the files renamed to a specific format. The format is easy to customize by simply dragging the naming categories from one input box to the other.

File Organizer

As you can see in the image above, I chose to rename my files and keep them in one folder with the file name following the format Author – Year – Title. I did not add the journal to the file name, but could have easily done so by just dragging it down into the file name.

There’s an option to organize the files into sub-folders, however I chose not to do so. That’s just my personal choice even though I know colleagues of mine prefer to separate things into sub-folders by year.

Once I’ve picked how I want my files to be sorted and renamed, I go ahead and click apply. Folders get created, files get renamed and I’m done:

Renamed Filenames

These file names are much easier to understand and are categorised how I want them. This feature has not only organized my files into a folder with proper file names, but it will keep any new documents I add in the same orderly fashion. Neat huh?

Mendeley Web now supports COinS

Jan Reichelt3 Comments

As one of the many requested features from our feedback page, Mendeley Web now supports COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). COinS is an open and easy to use specification for publishing OpenURL bibliographic metadata in HTML. On web pages, embedded COinS can be read and processed by applications.

Also Mendeley’s Web Importer can now identify COinS embedded on other websites. This information can then be easily imported into your Mendeley research library. In addition, a COinS section is embedded in each of our article pages. This means that other bookmarklets can extract and process the information from Mendeley’s article pages.

Addendum: COinS are not only embedded in article pages but also in profile pages (own publications list) and in public collection pages.