Mendeley Guide: In-text references and bibliography

Adding in-text references and bibliography

• Place the cursor to where you want the citation to appear in and choose Insert...citation. The in-text reference will appear in your text.
• At Citation Style you can choose your citation style. 
• Place the cursor to where you want the bibliography to appear in and choose More -> Insert Bibliography. The bibliography will appear in your text and it will update when you add more in-text references in your text.

Which citation style?

Mendeley has almost 7000 citation styles available. If you do no know the name of the citation style you should use, try the form on the Search by example site.

Instructions for publishing in the series Acta Universitatis Ouluensis: Bibliographic management programs.

Editing references

You can edit your in-text references by clicking on them. This activates the blue frames around the citation and opens the editing options on the right-hand side into Mendeley Cite. 

• Clicking the reference pill in Mendeley Cite allows you to make the most common edits:  
  • Add page numbers in the references
  • Hide the author's name (Suppress author)
  • Anything written in the Prefix box will appear at the beginning, and anything written in the Suffix box will appear at the end of the in-text reference
• +Add reference allows you to add more references in the existing citation.
• Any errors in spelling or missing information in the references should be fixed in the Mendeley library, so that the information will also be correct in the bibliography. When you return back to Word after correcting the references, click ... -> Update From Library, and any changes you made will be updated into the Word file.
• Choosing Manually override a citation will allow you to make any changes in the in-text reference. Using this, the reference in question will not be updated by information pulled from the Mendeley library, so use this feature with caution. Any changes made can be reversed by using the Revert to default button.
• The font of the in-text references and bibliography can be edited in Word.

Editing the bibliography

• In general, references should be edited in Mendeley library. Remember to click ... -> Update From Library in Mendeley Cite if you make edits while your Word document is open.
• You can change the citation language in Mendeley Cite in Citation Settings.
• You can change the bibliography into plain text by removing the link to Mendeley Library. 
  • Finish your document before updating the bibliography.
  • It may be sensible to save a backup copy of your document before proceeding with the next phase. On the other hand, you can always create the bibliography again using Insert Bibliography, if you need to add more references later.
  • Right click on the active bibliograpy and choose Remove content control. The connection to Mendeley is severed and it cannot be restored.
  • Manually edit the bibliography.

Editing the citation style

if you cannot find a suitable citation style, it is possible to edit an existing style with CSL Editor on the Mendeley homepage. You can use an existing style as a template. CSL Editor saves your edited style to your Mendeley account. From there, you can also share it with other users. 

More information on editing a citation style