Importing to Mendeley

Using Mendeley for the course can be a little tricky. The reason is because we want to share PDFs without forcing every single person in the class to purchase the software.

What we do, therefore, is to use Mendeley groups, so that we can share citation data, but we do not put PDFs in the cloud via Mendeley. Instead, we store PDFs in a Dropbox that is shared among class members.

The Dropbox has all the papers using the Mendeley naming convention: [Author(s)] - [Year] - Title.pdf

Mendeley will rename files with this convenient naming format, but to minimize problems, use this procedure.

• Download Mendeley for your desktop computer and install (http://mendeley.com)
• Create a Mendeley account for yourself.
• Join the "AdvancesInMeasuringBehavior" group.
• Add the Dropbox "MendeleyLibrary" paper directory to your computer (ask for the link)
• In Mendeley, go to Tools -> Options -> Watch Folders and select that dropbox directory (and probably only that directory)
• Also go to Tools -> Options -> File Organizer and check "Organize my files" and then select the path to your Dropbox folder (for me, it is C:\Users\Intille\Dropbox\MendeleyLibrary). Check "Rename document files" and make sure you have Author - Year - Title.pdf selected. Do not check "Sort into subfolders".
• From the Mendeley website, install the Mendeley Web Importer for your browser (find it here: http://www.mendeley.com/import/). This will give you a "Save to Mendeley" button in your browser (it works in Explorer, I have not tried the others).

Now, when you want to add a paper, the best way is to find the paper on a site such as Pubmed or the ACM Digital Library. You can click on the "Import to Mendeley" button. Uncheck download PDF. Save the info to the AdvancesInMeasuringBehavior group -- this is important, because there is a difference between saving your reference information to the group versus on you local machine. Be sure to tag it and fix all the messed up information in the various fields (including capitalization) in the Mendeley GROUP (versus on your local machine). If you can't find the paper reference info in a digital library, then enter the info manually.

Next, get the PDF from wherever you have found it. Temporarily save it to your computer's desktop without using the naming convention (e.g., use something like AddFileIntille ... anything except the naming convention, because you don't want Mendeley to try and use the name to grab the reference info). Then, after you have entered the citation info in Mendeley, drag the PDF file into the Dropbox directory. Mendeley should then immediately rename the file and it should be linked to your Mendeley list.

This procedure is not perfect. In particular, sometimes you can end up with duplicate entries in Mendeley. You can use Tools -> Check for duplicates to get rid of them, though. Something has also changed recently and this seems to not be working particularly well. If you want, you can just use the group data and then manually name the PDF and put it in th Dropbox directory.

Let Stephen know if you encounter problems.