Skip to Main Content
  2. Research Guides

Citation Management: Mendeley

About Mendeley

Mendeley is a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.

Mendeley at VU

Vanderbilt has an institutional license for Mendeley. Register with your Vanderbilt email and you will be automatically assigned a premium upgrade. Mendeley requires the user to store all basic citation data on its servers—storing copies of documents is at the user's discretion. Upon registration, Mendeley provides the user with 2 GB of free web storage space, and the institution edition offers free 100 GB storage space if registered using a Vanderbilt email.

Please note: Access to these benefits will expire 12 months after the last time they sign in to Mendeley from within your institution’s IP range, following which their account will return to the standard, free version. You will receive an email reminding you to login.

Compare the free version of Mendeley to the Institutional Edition:

 Feature  Free Version  Institutional Version
 Cite and Reference  Yes  Yes
 Read and Annotate  Yes  Yes
 Mendeley Suggest  Yes  Yes
 Researcher Profile and Stats  Yes  Yes
 Career Portal  Yes  Yes
 Data repository  Yes  Yes
 Personal Library Storage Space  2GB  100GB
 Shared Library Storage Space  100MB  100GB
 Number of Private Groups  5  Unlimited
 Private Group Size  25  100

Download Mendeley Applications

Mendeley Features

From Wikipedia

Mendeley is available either as a premium payable version or a basic version that is free but requires registration.

  • Mendeley Desktop, based on Qt, runs on Windows, Mac (Sierra and High Sierra no longer supported) and Linux.
  • Automatic extraction of metadata from PDF papers.
  • Back-up and synchronization across multiple computers and with a private online account.
  • PDF viewer with sticky notes, text highlighting and full-screen reading.
  • Full-text search across papers.
  • Smart filtering, tagging and automatic PDF file renaming.
  • Citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org, and LibreOffice.
  • Import of documents and research papers from external websites (e.g., PubMed, Google Scholar, Arxiv) via browser bookmarklet.
  • BibTeX export/file sync.
  • Private groups to collaboratively tag and annotate research papers.
  • Public groups to share reading lists.
  • Social networking features (newsfeeds, comments, profile pages, etc.).
  • Usage-based readership statistics about papers, authors and publications.
  • iPhone app.
  • iPad app.
  • Android app.

Who to Contact

For citation management software training and support, contact one of the following library staff members or libraries:

EndNote
Eskind Biomedical Library Reference
Science and Engineering Library Reference

Chris Benda (Divinity Library)
Ramona Romero (Central Library)

Mendeley
Eskind Biomedical Library Reference
Peabody Library Reference

Zotero

Divinity Library Reference 
Peabody Library Reference
Science and Engineering Library Reference

Heather Laferriere (Eskind Biomedical Library)
Kate Linton (Music Library)
HD McKay (Management Library)
Pam Morgan (Central Library)
Ramona Romero (Central Library)