FAQ

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What is Mendeley?

It's a combination of desktop software and website which helps you manage, share and discover both content and contacts in research.

Our software, Mendeley Desktop, offers you:

  • Automatic extraction of metadata (authors, title, journal etc.) from academic papers into a library database. Saves you a lot of manual typing! The more people use Mendeley, the better the extraction quality will become.
  • Super-efficient management of your papers: "Live" full-text search across all your papers – the results start to appear as you type! Mendeley Desktop also lets you filter your library by authors, journals or keywords. Use document groups, notes and tags to organize your knowledge, and export the metadata in different citation styles.
  • Sharing and synchronization of your library (or parts of it) with selected colleagues. Perfect for jointly managing all the papers in your Lab!
  • More good stuff: A fast and integrated PDF viewer, a plug-in for citing your articles in Microsoft Word, OCR (image-to-text conversion, so you can full-text search all your scanned PDFs) and more good stuff coming very soon.

Our website, Mendeley Web, complements Mendeley Desktop by offering you these features:

  • Online back up of your library: Store your library in your account and access it from anywhere through a browser.
  • Detailed statistics of all things interesting: You can upload your own publications to your research profiles, then track the evolution of your readership. How often are your papers downloaded? How often are they read? From which academic disciplines and geographic regions do your readers come? Additionally, there are detailed statistics for each academic discipline and research topic. Who are the up-and-coming authors in your discipline? Is the interest in a research topic growing or declining? What are the most widely read papers on a specific subject?
  • A research network that allows you to keep track of your colleagues' publications, conference participations, awards etc., and helps you discover people with research interests similar to yours.
  • Recommendation engine for papers that might interest you, but are not yet in your library! Based on what you know already, what should you read next? Coming soon

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Why should I register? Can't I also use Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web without registering?

A quick registration on our website (it only takes one minute, really!) is required to use the networking and sharing features on Mendeley. In principle, you could download and use Mendeley Desktop without ever registering. Honestly though, there's no good reason to do that: Both Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web become much for powerful when you use them with your free account!


As a registered user, you can back up your library online, share and synchronize it with selected users, and receive recommendations for papers that might interest you. You can upload your publications to your research profile and watch how your readership evolves over time and across disciplines. Additionally, you can access detailed statistics about the up-and-coming research topics in each discipline. Fore more details, please see What is Mendeley?

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Is Mendeley free?

The straight answer would be yes and no. Yes, it's free, because: Everything you get when you sign up to Mendeley is completely free and will always remain free - including the features described in What is Mendeley? No, it's not completely free, because: At a later point in time, we will expand on the mentioned features and introduce additional ones for professional users – these will be available for a (very reasonable) fee.

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How much of an effort is it to set up and maintain my library in Mendeley?

We've designed Mendeley so that setting up your library is almost as painless as sunshine and kittens. It does initially require a few minutes of your time, but it's worth it. Once the library is set up, Mendeley makes your research much more efficient instead of slowing you down. Here's how it works:

After you've installed Mendeley Desktop on your computer, you simply drag PDFs into the Mendeley library. The automatic recognition starts to run and extracts the metadata (and the more people use Mendeley, the better the recognition will become; also see How does the automatic recognition work?). In the best case, that's it – you can start using your library! In the worst case, you may have to correct some recognition errors manually. But even then, Mendeley has an auto-complete feature which starts to suggest author and journal names as you type.

Afterwards, it's completely effortless. You can full-text search all your documents, tag and annotate them, and automatically synchronize your library with your Mendeley Web account. The content, statistics, and article recommendations on Mendeley Web will be specifically tailored to you based on your existing library – no additional work required.

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I'm already using EndNote or another bibliographic management tool – do I have to set everything up again?

No, you can easily import your existing library database. Mendeley currently supports importing and exporting EndNote XML files, RIS files (the standard format of many academic databases) and BibTeX files.

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How does the automatic metadata extraction work? Will its quality improve over time?

The automatic extraction of metadata (authors, title, journal etc.) from a research paper works in several steps.

First, the full text is extracted from the article (currently, only text PDF documents are supported; OCR support for scanned image PDFs is coming soon).

Then, Mendeley Desktop generates a "fingerprint" from the article's text. The fingerprint is anonymously sent to the Mendeley server (the server doesn't store this information and no one can see which articles you are reading). The server checks whether correct metadata already exists for this fingerprint and, if that's the case, downloads it.

If no corresponding fingerprint is found, Mendeley Desktop searches the article's text for a DOI ("Digital Object Identifier") number. Should it detect a DOI, it queries the CrossRef database for the correct metadata.

Finally, if no DOI is found either, Mendeley Desktop uses algorithms to analyze the full text extracted from the article and tries to "guess" the metadata. Unfortunately, it won't guess correctly 100% of the time. However, if you correct the recognition mistakes, other Mendeley users can benefit from this as well! Here's how:

As you know, you can back up your Mendeley Desktop library to your account on Mendeley Web. When you do so, the aforementioned fingerprint and the metadata which you corrected are uploaded to your account. The Mendeley server aggregates the metadata + fingerprints across all user accounts into a completely anonymous common metadata pool (also see What about privacy?). So the next time another user runs the same article through the automatic metadata extraction, the metadata you corrected can be retrieved from the Mendeley server via the fingerprint. In this way, every user benefits from the other users' corrections.

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What about privacy? Will others be able to see my Library?

No! We take your privacy very seriously. No one will be able to see the contents of your library, unless you explicitly share it with them. Also, no personal information or data about your ongoing research will ever be published on your research profile, unless you yourself choose to do so.

Mendeley only aggregates metadata and statistics from the individual users' accounts anonymously (see the illustration below). Nothing about your personal data can be inferred from the aggregated data. As a user, you and everyone else will benefit from this anonymous aggregation because it

  • improves the automatic metadata extraction,
  • allows you unprecedented insights into the statistics and research trends of your academic discipline,
  • will help to create the world's largest academic database, open and accessible to everyone.



Should you disagree with this policy or be worried about something, please do not hesitate to . We pledge to you that you own your data, and that you can always delete it from our servers completely – no records whatsoever will be kept. For more details, please also see our Privacy Policy.

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Am I allowed to post PDFs of my publications on my Mendeley Web profile page?

Yes, in the vast majority of cases this is not a problem at all. To quote the EPrints Self-Archiving FAQ:

Texts that an author has himself written are his own intellectual property. The author holds the copyright and is free to give away or sell copies, on-paper or on-line (e.g., by self-archiving), as he sees fit. For example, the pre-refereeing preprint can always be legally self-archived.

Self-archiving of one's own, non-plagiarized texts is in general legal in all cases but two. The first of these two exceptions is irrelevant to the kind of self-archiving BOAI is concerned with, and for the second there is a legal alternative.

Exception 1: Where exclusive copyright in a "work for hire" has been transfered by the author to a publisher -- i.e., the author has been paid (or will be paid royalties) in exchange for the text -- the author may not self-archive it. (...)

Exception 1 is irrelevant [for this case, which is concerned] only with peer-reviewed research, for which the author is paid nothing, and no royalty revenue or author fee is expected, sought, or paid.

Exception 2: Where exclusive copyright has been assigned by the author to a journal publisher for a peer-reviewed draft, copy-edited and accepted for publication by that journal, then that draft may not be self-archived by the author (without the publisher's permission). (...)

Of the nearly 10,000 journals surveyed over 90% are already "green" (i.e., they have already given their official green light to author self-archiving: 62% for postprints, 29% for preprints). Many of the remaining 9% "gray" journals will agree if the author asks.

Perhaps the most sensible default strategy of all is the one that the physicists have been successfully practicing since 1991 and computer scientists have been practicing since even earlier: "don't-ask/don't-tell": Simply self-archive your preprint as well as your postprint, and wait to see whether the publisher ever requests removal. After nearly a decade and a half of practicing this default strategy, and at least a million and a half self-archived papers in physics and computer science, only a handful of papers have ever been removed because a publisher requested it. On the contrary, virtually all physics journals and most computer science journals have since become officially "green" in response to the physics and computer science community's evident desire and determination to enjoy the research benefits of providing open access to their own papers by self-archiving them, and they now even encourage the self-archiving. In contrast, those researchers who during that decade and a half have not been practicing this default strategy have instead needlessly lost a decade and a half's worth of cumulative research impact.

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Will my data be locked into Mendeley once I start using it?

No. We're researchers ourselves, so we know how important it is to be able to have control over your data. You own your data, so we will never lock it in, and you will always have the option of exporting it in the most common formats (currently, that is EndNote XML, RIS and BibTeX). For more information, also see What about Privacy?

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What does the name "Mendeley" mean?

The chemists and biologists among you may have already deduced from whom we derive our name: Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev (alternatively spelled Mendeleev), who developed the periodic table of elements, and Gregor Mendel, who is often called the "father of modern genetics".

We liked the analogies: Just as Gregor Mendel studied the inheritance of traits in plants, Mendeley will enable you to trace how ideas and academic theories evolve and cross-pollinate each other. Dmitri Mendeleyev formed the periodic table based on the properties of known elements, then used this data to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered - and Mendeley will help you discover new literature based on the known elements in your library.

That was the short version. If you're interested, here's the full story of how our name evolved from B-movie monster to Mendeley.

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Which operating systems does Mendeley Desktop support?

Mendeley Desktop runs natively on Windows (32 and 64bit), Mac (PPC32 and i386 with OSX 10.4 or later) and Linux (x86_64 and i386). On some Windows Vista 64bit machines, there might be a few problems, but we're working on those.

We'll try to support other operating systems and architectures on request - just .


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HOWTO: Recover from local database problems

There are the following option which you can run Mendeley Desktop with.

  • --repair-database
This option will try to repair your local database by removing all currently known invalid data. This will also run every ten startups and every startup after a synchronisation error.
  • --migrate-offline
This option will turn your online library into an offline library (as if you had never entered your email address and password); this can be turned back into an online library by removing the option, and entering your email address and password again.
  • --reset
This option will delete your local database files and settings so you have a fresh start with Mendeley Desktop

This is how you add the option (in Windows):

  1. Create a new shortcut to Mendeley Desktop
  2. Right click on it, and select 'Properties'
  3. Change to the 'Shortcut' tab
  4. At the end of the "Target" box, add " --option"
    5. For example, the target box may contain something like: "C:\Program Files\Mendeley Desktop\MendeleyDesktop.exe" --option
  5. Close and run Mendeley Desktop through that shortcut

If you still have problems with Mendeley Desktop after trying those option you can email your local database files to and we will try to help. Your local DB is located here - open an explorer/finder window and navigate to:

  • Windows Vista: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mendeley Ltd.\Mendeley Desktop
  • Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\«Your Name»\Local Settings\Application Data\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley Desktop\
  • Linux: ~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop/
  • MacOS: Macintosh HD -> «Your Name»/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/

If you have not entered an email address into Mendeley Desktop, your database file is called "online.sqlite". If you have entered your email address, the local database is a file called "«yourEmailAddress»@www.mendeley.com.sqlite"; for example, "john.doe@provider.com@www.mendley.com.sqlite".

Additional notes: The database is stored in SQLite format. You can browse its contents using the SQLiteBrowser tool (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/) amongst others.