FAQ

Mendeley is a combination of a desktop application and a website which helps you manage, share and discover both content and contacts in research.

Our software, Mendeley Desktop, offers you:

• Automatic extraction of document details (authors, title, journal etc.) from academic papers into a library database, which saves you a lot of manual typing! As more people use Mendeley, the quality of the data extraction improves.
• 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. You can also use document collections, notes and tags to organize your knowledge, and export the document details in different citation styles.
• Sharing and synchronisation of your library (or parts of it) with selected colleagues. This is perfect for jointly managing all the papers in your lab!
• More great features: 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 lots more new features being worked upon.

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

• An online back up of your library: Store your documents in your account and access them from anywhere through your 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 from? 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.
• A 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

A quick and free registration on our website (it only takes one minute, really!) is necessary to access a number of online features that really enhance your Mendeley experience:

• Automatic retrieval of document details, abstract, keywords for your PDF collection from a number of external databases, e.g. CrossRef, PubMed, Google Scholar, arXiv.
• One-click import from online bibliographic databases, e.g. ISI Web of Knowledge, ScienceDirect, EBSCO, ACM, IEEE etc.
• Networking and sharing documents with colleagues.
• Creation of groups public invite-only and totally open public groups.
• Synchronize your research paper library across multiple PCs and manage it online through a web browser.
• Access to research trends and statistics about the top papers, authors and journals in your academic discipline.

Yes! There is and always will be a free version of Mendeley. On top of the free version, you can also upgrade to our premium plans with additional features for a (very reasonable) fee.

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.

Mendeley Desktop runs natively on Windows (32 and 64bit), Mac (Intel with OS X 10.5 or later) and Linux (32 and 64bit).

Yes, you can change the privacy level of your profile in your privacy settings.

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 your 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 document details (and as 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 synchronise 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 is required.

1. The contents of the PDF are analyzed and Mendeley tries to 'guess' which text constitutes the authors, title and other metadata. The accuracy of this step will depend on factors such as the complexity of the article's layout.
2. Mendeley looks for identifiers such as DOIs and Arxiv IDs in the paper.
3. Mendeley sends the extracted metadata and any identifiers found to Mendeley Web which in turn queries various online sources, such as Arxiv, PubMed and CrossRef for more accurate data. If better quality metadata can be found online it is used, otherwise the document details extracted from the contents of the PDF are used.

The extraction process is imperfect but we are working to improving the quality of the automatic extraction and the comprehensiveness of the data available on Mendeley Web.

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.

• See the How do I import my existing references from EndNote entry for information on importing references from EndNote
• See the How do I import my existing references from Zotero entry for information on importing references from Zotero

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?

Perform the following steps to activate document synchronization with CiteULike, so documents you add to your CiteULike account will be imported to Mendeley automatically:

• On your settings page, scroll to the bottom and enter your CiteULike username. Then click OK, and allow any pop-up blocking messages displayed by your browser — if any.
• You will be taken to an activation message on CiteULike's site — confirm this action.
• This will take you to your Edit Profile page with a check-box displayed next to Enable Mendeley. You will find this at the bottom of the form, highlighted. Click Update Profile to save this.
• You will now see your CiteULike profile page. Don't worry if you don't see any confirmation — this is normal. The synchronization is now set up successfully.

You can enable, or disable, Mendeley synchronization by going to your Edit Profile page on CiteULike, and checking, or unchecking, the check-box labelled Enable Mendeley. If you don't login to Mendeley once every 30 days, this sync will be disabled. You can re-enable it by re-checking this box.

1. In EndNote, select the references that you want to import into Mendeley Desktop, and click File > Export...
2. In the window that appears, there is a box labeled 'Files of type:', in that box select 'XML (*.xml)'
3. Choose a name for the file and click the 'Save' button
4. Open Mendeley Desktop and click File > Add Files
5. Select the file which you exported from EndNote and click Open

Mendeley Desktop now supports importing your documents directly from Zotero. To do this, you'll need to install Mendeley Desktop onto the same computer as where you have Zotero installed.

Once done, open up Mendeley Desktop and go to Tools > Options (or Mendeley Desktop > Preferences if you're on a Mac) and select the Zotero / CiteULike tab. From here, just enable the checkbox for Zotero integration. Mendeley Desktop will attempt to automatically locate your Zotero database, however you can choose to use an alternate Zotero database if desired.

Once you've clicked Apply, all of your existing documents from Zotero will be imported into Mendeley Desktop, and any future items you add to Zotero should find their way into Mendeley Desktop automatically.

1. In Papers, select the File menu and then Export... > Refman RIS file
2. In the Save as field, type in a name for the exported file. This could be anything, ExportedLibrary for example.
3. In the Where field select the folder that you want to save your library file to.
4. Click Export
5. In Mendeley Desktop, click the Add papers button, select the file you exported from Papers, and click Open.

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 document details 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 document details 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.

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.

These pages that are currently presented on our site are a prototype of article pages. We're currently using a number of techniques to create these article pages, ranging from crowd sourcing information anonymously from users, to verification with external data sources where available.

Occasionally, errors may result from the data mining techniques we're using to try and clean up the data we agregate due to problems the the primary sources themselves. As such, we really do welcome any feedback that you may have, as this will allow for us to refine and improve our methods to see that the information becomes more accurate.

If you find that a document has been included in our catalog that really should not be, or that a document requires correction, you can send an e-mail to . When reporting content, please try to include a URL to the catalog page, along with as much information that you feel is relevant.

Groups are a simple way for you to collaborate with your colleagues to create a shared collection of documents. Groups allow members to put together a list of papers and share notes.

There are three types of groups:

• Private Groups - These are invite-only groups whose content (PDFs, annotations, notes, etc.) will only be visible to members of the group. These groups are great for private research projects.
• Public Invite-only Groups - These are groups which are visible to anyone, but only members can contribute to them. The group owner administers the group, but all members can invite other people to it. These groups are great for public reading lists or curating your lab’s research output.
• Public Open Groups - These are groups anyone may join and contribute to. They are designed for open discussion groups and a great way to build community-driven collections of literature around any subject.

We have turned all old public collections into public invite-only groups. Anyone who was following your public collection has now been made a follower of this new public invite-only group. If you want to make these people collaborators in your group, we have made that easy to do in the settings pane for the group. You can also make the group totally open. Public groups only share the meta-data of document items, so we have kept your public collection in your personal library.

If you were following a public collection, and you added some extra documents to that collection in your personal library, don't worry. We have made a copy of the public collection in your library with the content that you had put together yourself before hand, and we have made a new read-only subscribed group for you that is following the new public group version collection that you used to subscribe to, so you won't lose any information.

Groups allow you to collaborate with your contacts or with any member of the Mendeley community. In private groups, you may share and annotate a list of documents with your collaborators from right within your PDF organizer, instead of emailing notes and ideas back-and-forth. In public groups, you may create a reading list with your colleagues and make it accessible to anyone on the web. Interested people may subscribe to the list so they get notified of new additions. Groups now also have an activity feed on Mendeley Web and in Mendeley Desktop, allowing you to keep up to date on new additions and discussions within the group.

Mendeley currently offers you a number of ways in which you can share your documents with your colleagues, or other Mendeley users. Depending upon what your needs are, one method may suit you better than the other.

Private groups:
Private groups are great for if you wish to share a document amongst your colleagues or lab partners. With a private group, you can upload files to which only a selected set of people have access to. Each member can collaboratively contribute to this group too - adding new papers, updating document details and by annotating and highlighting PDF files.

Currently, private groups are limited to 10 members - however as part of a premium subscription package, you can extend the size of your private groups.

If a private group sounds right for your needs, you can read more on how to create one here.

Private groups were previously known as shared collections.

Public Groups:
If you wish to simply publish a reading list, or set of recommended or related papers, public groups are ideal. Through the use of a public group, you can drag and drop files into the group and anyone can subscribe to it to receive updates as and when you make changes.

You can add other Mendeley users as members of the group, and they can help you curate a reading list, or you can create a totally open public group that anyone can join.

Files attached to documents in a public groups will not be available to the subscribers or to the other members, these groups are only for creating reading lists. Only you and the group members will be able to make updates to this collection that all of the subscribers will receive.

You can create two kinds of Public Groups, invite-only which has a restricted membership list, and open, which anyone can join.

If a public group seems to be the right fit for the task, you can read how to create one here.

You can create a Public Group in both Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web.

In Mendeley Web, first sign in and then click on the Groups link at the top of the page. From here, you'll see a "Create Your Own Group" icon which you can click. This will bring you to the Group Creation form where you can set the name, a description, tags, some disciplines and the privacy level of the group.

After creating the group you can go to the Settings pane of the group to add members.

Within Mendeley Desktop, locate the "Groups" header in your list of collections on the left, and click on "Create Group". You will see the same group creation form from the Mendeley Web, and you can set the name, a description, tags, some disciplines and the privacy level of the group.

Once done, you can select your newly created shared collection on the left, and then locate the "Edit Settings" button above the centre column. From here, you can manage your groups's members.

Adding more than 10 members to a Private Group or an invite-only Public Group requires a premium plan.

In order to have more than 5 of these kinds of groups you have to upgrade to one of our premium plans.

Mendeley Web accounts are currently limited to 1 GB of web space (500 MB of which for your library and 500 MB for Private Groups) for uploading PDFs and other files you have attached to your references. To add more documents please upgrade to one of our premium plans.

Yes. You can always update your plan from your by clicking on Upgrade. To downgrade, please go to your Account details page.

Simply go to My Account > Billing Details. There, under Payment Details, you'll find the link to change your card details.

If you have forgotten the password that is required to log into your Mendeley account, please head over to our password reset form. Enter the e-mail address you registered your account with, and we'll send you instructions on how to reset your password.

You can do this by logging in on the website and going the Personal Details section of your account page. Note that the new e-mail address will have to be verified for the change to take effect. Also, remember that once the e-mail address is changed, you will need to modify your Mendeley Desktop login details to continue synchronizing your account.

The following is the list of currently suported browsers:

• Internet Explorer 7
• Internet Explorer 8
• Internet Explorer 9
• Firefox 6 and newer
• Chrome 14 and newer
• Safari 5 and newer

Please follow these steps:

1. Make sure that you have javascript and cookies enabled in your browser.
2. Clear the cookies in your browser.
3. Try again.
4. If that hasn't solved the problem, please try and see if the problem persists in other browsers available.

Please ensure that you're using the same details (E-mail address and password) to log into Mendeley Web and in Mendeley Desktop. You can verify this by opening the 'General' tab in Mendeley Desktop's Tools > Options (on Windows and Linux) or Preferences (on Mac).

If the entries on your Mendeley Web library don't contain attached files, please first verify that Mendeley Desktop has been configured to upload your files.
You can configure which files get uploaded by first selecting 'All Documents' in the folders list on the left side panel of Mendeley Desktop. From here, click on "Edit Settings" above the centre column and configure this as best suits you. Click on 'Apply and Sync' and wait for this sync to finish.
Please also verify that you're using the same details (E-mail address/password) to log into Mendeley Web and in Mendeley Desktop. You can verify this by opening the 'General' tab in Mendeley Desktop's Tools > Options (on Windows and Linux) or Preferences (on Mac).
If even after this, the files don't appear on your web library, please drop us an e-mail giving us details on the references for which these files are attached to. Additionally, a copy of one or two of the files that fail to show up in your web library would be most helpful.

Files can only be downloaded from private groups. If you attempt to download a file from a public group, either open or invite only, you will receive this message. Learn more about sharing documents here.

Mendeley Desktop 1.3 and earlier do not support 64-bit versions of Word 2010. Mendeley Desktop 1.5 and later do support 64-bit versions of Word. See the downloads page for a link to the current stable version and the previews page for links to download the current preview version.

1. Install Qt from the standard Fedora repositories (if you have any KDE applications installed, you probably already have this). Mendeley Desktop requires Qt 4.6 or later.
2. Download the 'generic Linux' version of Mendeley Desktop from the download page. If you are using Fedora 16 or later, you may need to download the preview release instead (see below).
3. Extract the tarball to a directory on your system using tar -xf <name of downloaded package>. This will create a folder named mendeleydesktop-<Version>-linux-<Arch>. Navigate into this directory.
4. To start Mendeley Desktop, run ./bin/mendeleydesktop from inside the extracted folder.

• Under Fedora 16 or Ubuntu 12.04 you will need to use Mendeley Desktop 1.5 or later.
You can download preview releases of Mendeley here.
• Mendeley Desktop requires Debian Lenny / Ubuntu 8.04 or an equivalently recent flavor of Linux.

We are currently using the CSL (citation style language) specification for the citation styles we use in Mendeley Desktop. The format specifications and some instructions on how to modify, or create your own citation styles can be found at: http://citationstyles.org/. A repository of currently available styles can also be found at: http://www.zotero.org/styles. The citation style files used by Mendeley Desktop are located in the "citationStyles" sub-directory of the folder where Mendeley Desktop is installed to. Adding new formatted .csl citation style files, or modifying existing ones will make them available in Mendeley Desktop. We're currently developing a citation style editor to be included in future releases.

Occasionally when you are importing references into Mendeley, they can become duplicated. This often happens when importing from completely different sources, such as a paper using the web importer bookmarklet, and then dragging a PDF of that same reference into Mendeley. With large libraries, identifying and resolving these duplicates can become a huge hassle. Luckily Mendeley now ships with tools to help you resolve these duplicates.

The first way we can help you resolve duplicates, is through our new "Check for Duplicates" tool.

This automatically scans the folder you've selected for duplicate documents. Documents that Mendeley identifies as possible duplicates will be grouped into "sets" in the main documents view. You can use the arrow to the left of each set to view all documents in that set. A column with a "confidence" meter is also displayed. This tells you how confident Mendeley is that it's chosen the correct metadata for the final merged document.

Checking for duplicates

1. Select any folder or group you would like to check for duplicates (eg: All Documents).
2. Select the "Tools" menu, and select the "Check for Duplicates" option.
3. Sets of duplicates will then be shown. Think of a set as what the result of your merge will look like when you confirm it. You can double click a set to expand it and view each duplicate document individually.

Merging duplicates

1. Select a set and review the metadata in the right hand details pane. Any field which has a tick to the left of it has no conflicts, which means a merge will result in no data being lost. If there are no conflicts, you can click the "Confirm Merge" button to merge the set.
2. If a field is un-checked, that means 2 or more duplicates in the set have conflicting data. Mendeley has tried to choose the "best value" to make merges as easy as possible, but it pays to run an eye over unchecked fields quickly as a habit.
3. If any un-checked field looks incorrect, you can edit the field as you would normally, to input the correct data.
4. Alternatively, if you know that one of your duplicates had the correct metadata, but Mendeley has picked the wrong data for some reason, you can expand the set by double clicking (or clicking the expand arrow to the left), select the correct document, and tick the box next to the metadata you want to use. You can pick and choose data individually this way from any documents in the set, but be aware that when you check a box here, it will overwrite what was previously selected as the correct data for the merge.

Incorrect duplicates

If you notice 2 documents have been put in a duplicate set, but are not duplicates, simply expand the set, select any document that's incorrectly marked as a duplicate, and click the "Not a Duplicate" button in the area above the details pane. This is often required if you have many items with "No Title".

Please note: The 'Not a Duplicate' decision is currently temporary, if you re-run the 'Check for Duplicates' tool again later these documents will still be shown as duplicates.

Manually merging duplicates

If you notice that you have duplicates that the tool isn't finding for some reason, no matter! You can merge any documents you like manually. Simply select 2 or more documents while holding down the CTRL key (or CMD key for Mac users) and you'll see that a "Merge Documents" button appears on the right hand pane. Click this and then follow the regular steps above.

Oops, I made a mistake!

With great power comes great responsibility. Any merge you do in the de-duplication tool can be undone using the standard Edit > Undo. If you only realize quite a bit later that you've made a mistake, don't worry. When duplicates are merged, all old documents are put into the Trash, and a new document is created from the merge process, so assuming you haven't cleared your Trash, you can restore the original documents from there, and attempt the merge again.

Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to print directly from Mendeley Desktop, although this is a feature that we plan to introduce in future releases.

If you have a Mendeley Web account, Mendeley will sync your documents and annotations with the web automatically. The simplest way to migrate to another computer is to install the software on your new PC and then enter your account details when prompted after starting the program for the first time. Your documents and annotations will then be fetched from the web and changes made on any PC will be synced to the others. Note that only files which are synced with Mendeley Web will be copied across. To change which files are synced, click the 'Edit Settings' button above the central documents list in Mendeley Dekstop.

If you do not already have a Mendeley Web account, you can sign up here.

Advanced users can also migrate by copying their database file from one machine to another. First log in to both machines with the same account details and then copy your database file across from the Mendeley data folder on the first machine to the Mendeley data folder on the second. See How do I locate Mendeley Desktop database files on my computer? for information on where to find the Mendeley data folder.

Mendeley Desktop records details about any problems that occur whilst it is running in a log file in the Mendeley data folder. Click here for instructions on where to find this folder on your computer.

If you are using Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 or later the file is called log-YYYY-MM-DD.txt (where 'YYYY-MM-DD' is the date when you were using the program).

If you are using Mendeley Desktop 0.9.8.2 or earlier, this file is called log.txt.

If you encounter problems with Mendeley Desktop, this log file may be helpful to diagnose the problem.

If you encounter problems updating from one version of Mendeley Desktop to another, there is also a file called update-log.txt which may be useful to diagnose the problem.

Mendeley has a built-in crash reporting system. If Mendeley crashes, restart it and when the Mendeley Crash Recovery dialog appears, click the Recover button to send us a report. Crash reports contain various pieces of information, including:

• The account which you are signed into Mendeley with.
• A section of the log file which records any errors or unusual events Mendeley noticed whilst it was running.
• Your current Mendeley Desktop settings
• A report that details which part of the program the crash occurred in.

We use the collected crash reports to diagnose and fix problems for the next release of the software. If Mendeley crashes or hangs repeatedly or you want to follow-up on a crash report you can contact support.

Linux Users: If you are familiar with using gdb to debug programs, it can be helpful to get a backtrace from Mendeley if it hangs or crashes. See this page for steps on manually getting a backtrace using gdb. To start the Ubuntu version of Mendeley in gdb, from a terminal run:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/mendeleydesktop/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
gdb /opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/mendeleydesktop

If you run into any issues when trying to synchronize Mendeley Desktop, please contact us by sending a message to support.
In order for us to best diagnose what's gone wrong, please include the following information in your message:

• The version of Mendeley Desktop that you are using, your operating system, and the version of that.
• A description of how the problem manifests itself. Did it start occurring after enabling a particular feature or performing a certain action? (Go into as much detail as possible)
• If Mendeley Desktop displays any error messages, please include them in your message.

We will get back to you as soon as possible, with instructions on how to resolve the issue, or additional debugging instructions.

Where your database files are stored varies from operating system to operating system. In order to locate yours, open an explorer/finder window and navigate to:

• Windows Vista/Windows 7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mendeley Ltd.\Mendeley Desktop\
• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\«Your Name»\Local Settings\Application Data\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley Desktop\
  Note that you might need to enable the "Show hidden files and folders" setting in Windows Explorer's folder options to be able to navigate to the Mendeley data folder.
• Linux: ~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop/
• MacOS: Macintosh HD -> /Users/«Your Name»/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/

If you have not entered an e-mail 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".
The database file containing information on the selected watched folder settings is called "monitor.sqlite".

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

Mendeley has a facility to generate to a 'verbose log' which includes all the data sent to and received from Mendeley Web during a sync. In order to get Mendeley Desktop to generate a verbose log file, you need to run it with the "--verbose-log" command line option.

To use this 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 " --verbose-log"
   For example, the target box may contain something like: "C:\Program Files\Mendeley Desktop\MendeleyDesktop.exe" --verbose-log
5. Close and run Mendeley Desktop using that shortcut

To use this option on Mac OS X:

1. Open up an instance of Terminal.app
2. Navigate to where Mendeley Desktop is installed by entering: cd /Applications/Mendeley\ Desktop.app/Contents/MacOS/
3. Run Mendeley Desktop like so: ./Mendeley\ Desktop --verbose-log

On Linux:

1. Open up a terminal, such as gnome-terminal or konsole.
2. If you installed the Debian, or Ubuntu package, enter "mendeleydesktop --verbose-log" without the quotes.
3. If you downloaded the generic Linux tarball, you need to navigate to where you extracted its contents (e.g "cd mendeleydesktop") and then run "./bin/mendeleydesktop --verbose-log" without the quotes.

Once open, try to perform a sync and wait for it to complete (or be interrupted by an error) and then close Mendeley Desktop.

The log is saved to a file called log.txt or log-YYMMDD.txt (where YYMMDD is the current date). The location of this file varies from operating system to operating system. In order to locate yours, please follow the corresponding value.

• Windows Vista / Windows 7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mendeley Ltd.\Mendeley Desktop\
• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\«Your Name»\Local Settings\Application Data\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley Desktop\
  Note that you might need to enable the "Show hidden files and folders" setting in Windows Explorer's folder options to be able to navigate to the Mendeley data folder.
• Mac OS X: Macintosh HD -> /Users/«Your Name»/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/
• Linux: ~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop/

If are simply looking for peace of mind, you can backup the database files that Mendeley Desktop stores.

You can manually create a backup from within Mendeley Desktop by clicking Help in your menubar, and then by selecting Create Backup.... From here, you can specify where you wish to save your backup files.

If you're using a version of Mendeley Desktop prior to v0.9.4, or need to manually create a backup due to a problem with Mendeley Desktop, you can do so by performing the following:

Where your database files are stored varies from operating system to operating system. In order to locate yours, please follow the corresponding value.

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley Desktop\
• Windows Vista / Windows 7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mendeley Ltd.\Mendeley Desktop\
• Mac OS X: /Users/<Your username>/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/
• Linux: ~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop/

Now that you have located where your database file is kept, you will want to copy this entire folder to somewhere safe. You can copy this to another computer, a USB stick, or another folder on your computer for safe-keeping.

Should you find yourself wishing to restore from a backup that you created previously with Mendeley Desktop, you can do this by first opening up Mendeley Desktop and ensuring that you're logged in as the user underwhich the backup was created. Once done, go to Help > Restore Backup > Other and navigate to where your backup is stored. Select this file, and follow the on-screen instructions that follow to restore your account to its previous state.

To restore your library from Mendeley Web, first open up Mendeley Desktop and then go to Help > Reset Mendeley Desktop. Upon clicking this, it will remove all of the data which you currently have stored within Mendeley Desktop and then restart Mendeley Desktop You can then re-enter your log in details and Mendeley Desktop will fetch all of the data from Mendeley Web back into Mendeley Desktop.

If you wish to confirm the state of your data on Mendeley Web before performing this, you can log into Mendeley Web, and then click on the Library tab at the top.

Mendeley Desktop supports a set of features that allow for you to perform much more powerful searches. You can use any number of these advanced queries within the search box in the top right of Mendeley Desktop.

You can narrow down which fields Mendeley Desktop should search for your specific keyword by using the following syntax, field:search term. Just replace the field with one of the values from the list below, for which fields you want to search.

• author, by, contributor, name: You can use any one of these keywords to specify that your term should only be searched for within a reference's authors, editors or translators. For example, author:Smith and name:Smith are both the same, and will search for references that have Smith in their authors, editors or translators.
• keyword: This will limit your search term to matching just the author's keywords for a document.
• publication: You can search amongst your references' journal titles or publications by using this keyword.
• tag: Using 'tag' will allow for you to search amongst documents that have a tag that contain your term.
• title: If you wish to search amongst just your reference titles, you can do so by using 'title'.

To match a phrase, as opposed to a single word, against a keyword, you can just wrap the search term in quotation marks ("). publication:"Science Weekly" would return all of your references that were published in "Science Weekly".

By default, if you enter more than one search term into Mendeley Desktop, it will search only for documents that match all of the terms entered. You can change this behaviour through the use of the OR keyword. By placing this in between two search terms, Mendeley Desktop will present a list of results that satisfy either of the search terms.

ponies OR "small horses" would provide a list of references that contain either "ponies" or "small horses" as opposed to only showing documents that have both of these terms.

You can also exclude documents that match certain terms from featuring in search results by placing a "-" before the search term. For example, entering horse -mare into the search box would return documents that feature "horse" but exclude those mentioning "mare".

If you no longer wish to use Mendeley Desktop, you can remove it entirely from your system by first checking that you've uninstalled any Word, or OpenOffice plugins you may have installed. To do this, open Mendeley Desktop, and from the Tools menu, select any options to Uninstall the respective plugins you may have installed.

On Windows, you can now go to the Start Menu and select All Programs > Mendeley Desktop > Uninstall. This will remove the Program Files directory for Mendeley Desktop.

On Mac OS X, you can simply drag the Mendeley Desktop application from your Applications folder to your Trash.

Note: If during the uninstallation process on Windows, one or all of the plugins fails to uninstall, you can remove them manually using the following procedures:

For the Microsoft Word plugin: Delete the file Mendeley-x.x.x.dot (where x.x.x is the version number) located in the following folder %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP.

For the OpenOffice plugin: Open OpenOffice, go to 'Tools->Extension Manager...' and remove the Mendeley entry.

Sometime our email are incorrectly identified as spam. To prevent that from happening, it's best if you add Mendeley to your safe sender list or address book. Here's how it works:

Gmail (Google Mail)
Open the email and click on the little arrow next to "Reply" and click on "Add Mendeley to Contacts list".

Microsoft Outlook
Open the email and click on "Actions" in the menu bar, then click on "Junk E-mail" and select "Add Senders Domain (@example.com) to Safe Senders List". Enter "mendeley.com" as a safe sender domain.

Microsoft Hotmail
Log in to Hotmail and click on "Options" (top-right corner) and "More options...". In the section "Preventing junk email" click on "Safe and blocked senders", then click on "Safe senders". In the dialog box type in "mendeley.com" and click on the "Add to list" button. To get back to your inbox click on "Go to inbox" in the top-left corner.

If your email provider is not listed here, please contact your email provider's customer support.