Skip to Main Content

Loyola University Chicago Libraries

Mendeley Citation Manager

Ways to Add to Your Library

Below are several ways that you can add citations to Mendeley to build your research library:

Remember that all the citations added to your personal Mendeley library are also added to the database of citations that Mendeley shares with everyone. If you don't want a citation in your personal Mendeley library to be added to the crowd-sourced library (e.g., unpublished papers, personal manuscripts), check Unpublished work at the bottom of the document details. 

Import/Drag PDF

A quick and easy way to get citations into your Mendeley Library is to drag PDF files or folders of PDFs into the middle pane of your Mendeley Desktop window. Mendeley will attempt to extract the citation information from the PDFs, and the new citations will show up in under Recently Added. If the extracted citation information is incomplete or missing, the citation will end up in Needs Review.  

You can also add your existing PDF files or folders to Mendeley using the Add Files menu in Mendeley Desktop.

Note: not all PDFs have information that can be extracted by Mendeley, and sometimes the citation information will be missing, incomplete, or incorrect. You may have to enter citation information manually, search the Mendeley catalog, or enter the DOI, PMID, or ArcXiv ID under Catalog IDs and use the Lookup (magnifying glass).

Enter Manually

Under the Files menu or the Add Files drop-down (Add Document in Mendeley Web), there is an option to enter citation information manually.

Import from Databases

After installing the Web Importer (bookmarklet) in your favorite browser, you can use the Save to Mendeley button on your bookmarks toolbar when you are viewing a citation record or list of search results in a supported database (including Web of Science, PubMed, Google Scholar). Be aware that the Web Importer may not always bring in all citations from your results list and/or may bring in incomplete citation information.

As you add the citation(s) to your Library, you can choose to put them in a particular folder. You can also choose 'download PDFs if available,' though this feature may or may not work well.   

Import from Other Citation Managers

If you already have citations in another citation manager like RefWorks, EndNote, or Zotero, you can export the records into RIS, BibTeX, PDF or EndNote XML file format. Then back in Mendeley, choose File, then Import, to import the records to your Mendeley Library.

Get from Other Users

You can search across the libraries of other Mendeley users to discover new papers on a topic. To do this, use the Literature Search option in Mendeley Desktop:

Literature Search

or you can click the magnifying glass on your dashboard in Mendeley Web to get to a Papers search:

Set Up a Watch Folder

You can have Mendeley 'watch' certain folders on your computer, then as PDFs are added to these folders they get imported into Mendeley automatically. Choose File - Watch Folder in Mendeley Desktop.

 

Auto-add documents with a Watch Folder

A Watch Folder allows you to automatically add new documents to your Mendeley library. Simply drop PDFs into the folder and Mendeley will import them automatically for you.

To set up a Watch Folder:

  1. Select the 'Watch Folder' option from the add files dropdown menu on the main toolbar and browse to the folder containing the documents you're interested in.

  2. Mendeley will add each document to your library, scanning each one for useful details such as title, author and journal.

  3. Any subsequent documents added to the folder will automatically be added to Mendeley.