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Course & Subject Guides

Mendeley @ Pitt

This guide is designed to help you build and manage your Mendeley citation manager and collection.

Mendeley Desktop

Adding Citations to Mendeley Desktop

There are several ways to add references to your Reference Manager (RM):

  1. Click and drag: a file or folder into the Mendeley library.  Mendeley will automatically extract metadata.
  2. Create an entry manually: Choose File --> Add Entry Manually…   This will allow you to edit the citation information as needed.
  3. Download from a database or PittCat: Many databases will provide a button allowing you to download a list or single citations.  Mendeley will read files in .ris format.  Simply choose the Export to RIS Format or similar option, save the file, and click and drag the saved file to Mendeley Desktop.  Other options that will work include: EndNote, Zotero, or BibTeX. Citations formatted for those software packages will also work with Mendeley.
  4. Create a reference manually -- You can create a reference from scratch by going to 
  5. –Export from database or catalog
  6. Drag & Drop -- If you have a .pdf file on your computer, you can click and drag a file into your RM.  Mendeley will then create a reference using the available metadata from that file.
  7. Add directly from the Mendeley Research Catalog. 
  8. Google Scholar or Web pages
  9. Import from a file or folder
  10. Watch Folder – Mendeley will watch the activity of any folders on you computer, and automatically add any new items

Using Mendeley Desktop

"Unpublished Work" setting

The Mendeley.com library of citations is crowd-sourced. What this means is that all the citations added to your personal Mendeley library are also added to the database of citations that Mendeley shares with everyone. This is what drives the discovery aspect of Mendeley--you can find new research based on what your colleagues and other scholars have added to their libraries. An important note: all citations are anonymized, so your citations will not be tied to your name or account in Mendeley.com.

There may be times when you don't want a citation in your personal Mendeley library to be added to the crowd-sourced library. For example, this could be unpublished papers, personal manuscripts, or class notes. To keep these citations private, be sure to check the "Unpublished work" button at the bottom of the document details form. For more information, follow this link.

Find citation information

When you import citations from either a PDF or directly from a database, sometimes the full citation information is not imported to your library. You can easily update your citation information by:

  • Entering the DOI (digital object idenifier) number to the Document Details screen
  • Select the magnifying glass image next to the DOI to search the web for citation information