Mendeley is a reference manager (and PDF organization tool for your hard drive) that serves as a bridge between your literature searches and finished papers. With Mendeley you can manage citations and PDFs, insert citations to a Word document, and create a bibliography. Mendeley also has many helpful features for citing in LaTeX.
Mendeley is owned by Elsevier.
An important notice about account creation. Following Elsevier's acquisition of Mendeley, Mendeley has been integrated into the Elsevier account ecosystem. One option Elsevier provides is authentication via CAS/netID credentials. If you want to use Mendeley Desktop, do not create an account using Shibboleth or an institutional account (their wording) at this time. As of December 2018, the desktop (non-web) version of the software does not support institutional account logins.
Otherwise, Mendeley is a freemium tool — it is not included in our Elsevier subscriptions, and individuals and labs generally pay for their own access beyond the free account levels.
There are two options to create a bibliography using Mendeley:
How to use the Word plugin
Click Insert Bibliography.
Note: You can change your citation style in the Mendeley toolbar or find more tools.
How to use a folder
If you are coming into Mendeley at the last minute and would prefer not to use the Word plugin (or have a different word processor), the best way to get your references into your bibliography is to create a folder in Mendeley.
Note: You will need to make sure that you are using the correct citation style before creating your bibliography from a folder. Citation styles can be found within View > Citation Style.
Mendeley has many helpful features for citing in LaTeX:
How to add references on Mendeley for desktop
Option 1: Watched Folders
Option 2: Import Files and Folders
Option 3: Enter Data Manually
How to add references to Mendeley web version
Use the Mendeley Web Importer (available for many modern browsers)
Note: for each of these methods, the data Mendeley can scrape from a PDF depends on how clean the source data is — garbage in, garbage out!
Depending on your version of Mendeley, the Word toolbar might appear under either References or Add-ins.
If you still need help using Mendeley, contact a librarian!