Organising and using your Mendeley library

Create folders

1. From the folders panel on the left-hand side, choose “create folder”.
2. Give the folder a name and press return.
3. The folder will now be listed in the folders pane.
4. Go to either the All Documents folder or the Unsorted folder. Highlight a reference and drag and drop it from the central reference panel into your new folder.
5. All your documents will always be stored in the All Documents folder as well as any folders you add them to.

Search for authors

1. Use the filter author function on the left-hand side to find all the documents by a particular author.
2. Click on “Clear” to return to the all document listing.

Read, search and annotate PDFs

1. A reference with an attached PDF will display a small PDF icon next to its listing in Mendeley desktop .
2. Either click on the PDF icon, or double click on the reference to open Mendeley's PDF Reader.
3. You can add notes and highlight text using the options on the top toolbar.
4. Your personal notes will appear in the record details. Add general notes or keywords here to enable you to retrieve them later. You can add individual keywords on separate lines.
5. Once you have finished adding notes, close the PDF by clicking the x in the PDF tab.
6. The notes will be saved automatically.

Search your notes

1. In the search box at the top right of the screen, select “Note” from the drop-down menu (this is a very tiny arrow on the left within the search box).
2. Enter your keywords and search to find all the PDFs with those keywords added.

Add a Watch Folder

1. If you save PDFs to a folder on your device, you can make this your “Watch Folder”. This means that any PDF documents you add to this folder will automatically be added to your Mendeley library.
2. Go to file, Watch Folder.
3. Navigate to the relevant folder and tick the box.
4. Click on Apply, then OK.