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Referencing software

A guide to a number of referencing software programmes

What is Mendeley ?

Mendeley is a free reference management software package, also known as bibliographic software, which enables you to:

  • Create and manage citations of books, articles, videos, and more
  • Import citations
  • Automatic metadata extraction from imported PDFs
  • Collaborate with other researchers online
  • Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
  • Highlight and annotate papers and share those notes with others
  • Organize using groups, tags, and filters

Free Version

The free version of Mendeley limits you to:

  • 2 GB of personal web storage
  • 1 Private group of up to 3 people
  • 100 MB of group web storage

To see how much storage you have left:

  • sign in to your web account
  • click on the drop-down arrow next to your initials in the top, right-hand corner
  • choose settings and privacy
  • select subscription from the options on the left

Mendeley Reference Manager

The new Mendeley Reference Manager replaced Mendeley Web Library and helps you simplify the tasks of building and organizing your reference library, making notes and annotations across papers, collaborating with others and inserting citations and bibliographies into the papers you’re writing.

It is available as both a desktop and web app:

Mendeley Reference Manager allows you to:

  • Import references using a variety of methods
  • Organize your references using Mendeley’s smart collections or by creating your own custom collections
  • Search your references by author, title, year and source
  • Private Groups: These invite-only groups allow you to share PDFs and annotations
  • Use the Mendeley Cite add-in for Microsoft Word to generate citations and bibliographies
  • Mendeley Reference Manager desktop and web versions are identical in look and functionality
  • Your library automatically syncs with its backup in the cloud whenever you add references or make changes.

See what you can do with Mendeley Reference Manager

Mendeley Desktop

Mendeley Desktop is the original desktop application  which is still available to download but is no longer being developed. Mendeley Web Library has been replaced with Mendeley Reference Manager.

Download Mendeley Desktop at mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop-legacy

The Mendeley desktop application allows you:

  • Automatic extraction of document details (authors, title, journal, etc.) from academic papers into a library database, which saves you a lot of manual typing!  As more people use Mendeley, the quality of the data extraction improves.
  • Super-efficient management of your papers.  "Live" full-text search across all your papers - the results start to appear as you type!  Mendeley Desktop also lets you filter your library by authors, journals, or keywords.  You can also use document collections, notes and tags to organize your knowledge, and export the document details in different citation styles.
  • Sharing and synchronisation of your library (or parts of it) with selected colleagues. 
  • More great features:  A plug-in for citing your articles in Microsoft Word, OCR (image-to-text conversion so you can full-text search all your scanned PDFs)

A short introductory Video to Mendeley Desktop

Get Help with using Mendeley