Using Mendeley for organizing your research readings

Mendeley is an application for managing and organizing research papers in both online and desktop.

In this post I would like to show how to organize your research papers using Mendeley.

First, if you don't have Mendeley account, go to http://www.mendeley.com/  and create a free account. 

You can download and install the application to your desktop by following the instructions provided in their website.

After installing the application, you can open it in your desktop. For the first time users it will ask you to login using your account (for that you need to be connected to internet,at least for first time). Login using your account details.

Now you  are in Mendeley desktop application. 

Let's setup few things for organizing you papers easily. 

File Organizer

Open "options" from Tools -> options. Now go to file organizer tab.

Check the "Organize my files" option and set the folder in which you want to save your papers.

If you want you can check other options for sorting files and renaming files. These options give you more control over file names and subfolders. 

 BibTex Organization

Now goto BibTex tab.

Check the "Enable BibTex syncing" options. Check one of the radio button option according to your choice of organizing bibtex files. In my case I opted to create one BibTex file per collection. And also choose a path for saving files.

After finishing the setting click OK.

Adding papers to the Mendeley

Now we are ready to add papers to your Mendeley. 

1. Finding paper and bibtex for it.

First search for paper you want to add to your research collection. For example I selected a paper from ieee explorer digital library. 

You will see option for Downloading citations.  You can find this option in any database collection. 

Click on it and download the bibtex file to your desktop. If only text is shown in the webpage, simply copy the contents to a file using any text editor and save it with .bib extension. 

In the above file I removed citation key, so that the mendeley will assign citation key automatically.

2. Adding bib file to mendeley.

 In Mendeley, go to file menu and select "Import -> BibTex file"

Choose the bib file you have just saved in your desktop. 

If the syntax of the bibtex file is without any errors you will see the details of the paper on right side. 

In this you can use options to add downloaded pdf file, change citation key etc. 

Now you can see the paper in you collection. 

Organizing More

In Mendeley you can organize your papers into collections using folders in My Library section on left side. You can add/delete/rename the folder names. You can put a paper in more than one folder according to your choice. 

You can see the bibtex files organization is done according to these collections if you choose bibtex file per collection option. 

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Organizing the papers and bibtex files in this way you find it easy when you want to take backup or using citations while writing your own papers.