Are you a Mendeley user? Mendeley offers a whole host of products that will help you manage your research, digitally.
There isn't much else to it. You need research to support your ideas. Mendeley takes your research and stores it somewhere, so you can retrieve when your ideas need to be supported. That's all.
Mendeley recognizes the importance of organizing your research, because they know that there's so many places to lose things. You could store your research online in some place you could access anywhere, yes, like your private folder in ProQuest Central or Ebscohost. But if you're using multiple databases for research, how are you going to keep track of which article you found in which database? (Good luck remembering all of those usernames and passwords, too.) The brilliance of Mendeley is it's ability to synchronize your library from multiple locations, so you needn't remember where you last left it.
Just imagine Mendeley as your research companion. It goes with you wherever you need to be to find what you need to find so that it can keep track of everything for you.
Mendeley Desktop is the classic Mendeley software. You may have it already installed on your computer.
Though this software will likely remain available to you for your whole tenure at Manhattanville, you may find the flexibility of Mendeley's new suite of add-in software to be more useful to you in the research you're performing.
Reference Manager
Mendeley Reference Manager manages annotations and citations for your papers. It can be used side-by-side with Microsoft word (or wherever you write your papers) to plug your annotation complete with an in-text citation right into your document. It also synchronizes automatically with references you add on the web version. Users of Mendeley Desktop will find the transition to Reference Manager most seamless.
It may be easiest to think of Reference Manager as the new home base of the Mendeley Suite of citation management products. Read on to find out of what else that suite includes, and how it may be useful to you!
Web Importer
Web Importer follows suit with other innovations in academic technology by moving focus away from private databases into broader online research. How much of your research have you found first through Google Scholar? The Web Importer Service takes that into account, allowing the user to activate a simple extension that detects the citations on a results list and imports them directly into the user's Mendeley Library.
You're probably performing all of the research for many of your papers completely online. That doesn't just mean peer reviewed articles -- it also means articles on websites, blog posts, and social media posts. You can import all of these with Mendeley's web importer, and once that material is in your library, Mendeley treats it just the same as an article you might download directly from ScienceDirect or Jstor.
This one you can find easily in the Chrome Web Store. Use it the way you'd use any other Chrome Extension, by hitting the little Mendeley Icon at the top right corner of your browser after it's installed.
Mendeley Cite is a Microsoft Word add-in that allows you to access your Mendeley Library right inside of Word. So when you're finished with your research and have a while collection of works you plan to cite, you can plug them right into your paper from the menu on the right, as shown below.
See? I just found that paper in the library's databases! I can then select the citation style required for my paper and plug the citation right in after my quoted passage.
Then when I'm finished with my paper, I can insert the ENTIRE bibliography without having to write out my sources one-by-one.
To get access to this add-in, simply click the 'insert' tab and then the three dots all the way on the right of the menu to see additional insert options -- "Add-Ins" should be one of those options. A window will then pop-up for the Office Add-ins store. When you search 'Mendeley', Mendeley Cite will come right up. You're now ready to begin plugging your citations in!
Have a Great Winter Break!!!