Mendeley

Mendeley is a reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research and collaborate with others online. Mendeley consists of an online account, a desktop install and a word plugin. The Mendeley Reference Manager allows you to store, organize and share your references and cite those references when you are writing a paper or report. The online and desktop version synchronize automatically to give you access to your library anywhere and anytime.

  • Getting started with Mendeley

    Register at Mendeley (direct access) and download the Reference manager. A web-importer and Microsoft Word plugin will be available in the downloaded program. Mendeley is also available for Mac (direct access) and Linux (direct access).

    After installation, you can consult ITC's Mendeley Manual for instructions on the usage of Mendeley.

  • Training

    The University Library offers Mendeley training as part of the optional courses of the PhD bootcamp, and tailor made courses can be arranged upon request.

    If you have a group of students or staff who want to get to know Mendeley, please send an email to your faculty's information specialist. We will arrange a tailor-made workshop. 

  • Managing storage limitations

    Mendeley has reduced storage from 100GB to 2GB as of December 17, 2024. This storage is only necessary for PDFs; the rest of the metadata takes up virtually no space. This means the number of actual items in your library—used for citing and creating bibliographies—remains unlimited. Once you exceed the 2GB limit however, you can't add new references. To prevent this, you can remove stored PDFs from your Mendeley library or transfer them to a new reference manager that allows for more storage.

    Many options exist for transferring your Mendeley library to a different manager, like Zotero or Endnote. The best method depends on the manager you transfer to and the metadata that need to be transferred. You can directly import references and PDFs into Endnote or Zotero but this is often slow and error-prone. Exporting from Mendeley, and then importing is usually the better option. 

    Exporting a list of references from Mendeley

    1. Select all references in your Mendeley library
    2. Click 'Export'
    3. Choose the desired format. Most reference managers can read RIS files, with BibTeX files as a good second option. When switching to Endnote or Zotero, you can use any option except 'Microsoft Word (*.xml)

      Exporting a list

    Exporting PDFs from Mendeley

    1. Install the latest version of Mendeley Reference Manager for Desktop. If you already have it installed, please download & run the linked installer to update it to the latest version, as one of the PDF export functions has only been added in a recent version.
    2. Launch the program and log in using organizational sign-on with your @utwente.nl email address.
    3. To save all your PDFs, including those from groups in your library: Click the three dots to open the menu next to 'All References'. Select 'Make Available Offline'. If you want only a subset, choose 'Make Available Offline' for that specific subgroup.
    4. Select an item in your library and scroll down to see the attached files.

      Select an item

      1. To view a list of all downloaded PDFs, select the bottom option: 'Open containing folder'. You will be taken to a folder with all PDFs Mendeley has downloaded. You can now copy these to your OneDrive folder.
      2. To export a PDF with Mendeley annotations, select 'Export PDF with Annotations'. You will need to do this individually for each item for which you want to preserve annotations.

    5. After saving everything you want, you can delete PDFs from Mendeley. This must be done individually for each item by selecting 'Delete PDF' in the same menu as the previous step. If you want to remove the largest items only, first download them all as shown in step 3, then open the folder as outlined in step 4a. Sort the files in this folder by file size to find the largest items.

My favourites

About Favourites
Use the Bookmark this page button on Service Portal pages to add that page to the My Favourites section. To add web applications, use the star icon in the webapplication list. To add pages outside the Service Portal, use the Add custom bookmark button above. Add your favourite apps to your bookmarks by using the favourite button.

The My Organisation section shows mandatory bookmarks for your your main unit.

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