Mendeley as a Research Tool

For anyone that is doing a research paper, whether it be a journal article, a thesis or dissertation, or even a school paper, Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/) is an invaluable tool (and it's free). I've used it quite a bit lately for writing papers and for doing my Master's Thesis. What I use it for is a place to put the PDFs of all the papers that I want to reference in my paper. I thought I'd give a couple tips on things that I've learned while using it.

LaTeX Bibliography

I highly recommend using LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org/) for writing research papers. There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get past that, it is so nice to have complete control over the layout and look of your document.  Creating a bibliography or references section for a paper using LaTeX and Mendeley is easy. Gone were the days when you had to carefully craft each reference to fit a particular style. Once all the papers you want to reference are in Mendeley, go to Edit-->Select All. Then click File-->Export. Select 'BibTeX' as the output type and give it a name (I call mine local.bib). Locate the folder to store it in, and then hit Save. Now in your LaTeX document, you can reference the file for your bibliography:

\newpage
\singlespacing
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{local}

Now, when you want to create a reference in the paper somewhere, you simply go back over to Mendeley. Right click on the paper you want to reference, and then click 'Copy LaTeX' citation. Go to your LaTeX document, and paste in the reference code where it belongs. Now when you create a PDF from your LaTeX document, the reference number is automatically set. So easy!

Peer Reviews

Another nice feature of Mendeley is the ability to highlight and make notes in the documents. I've used this as a way to get comments from my advisor. You could do this with Microsoft Word of course, but it's nice to use the same tool for reviewing your paper that you use to review other papers.

One thing that I have not quite figured out yet is how to update a document. If I make changes to a document, if I want to replace it, I have to actually delete the file attachment and reattach the file. You might lose highlights and notes doing it that way though. What I've had to do is just create a new document for the updated file and call it Rev 2 or something.

How to Move a Window that is Off the Screen

Sometimes I run into situations where a window is off the screen and I need to move it back into view. This happens often when using Remote Desktop from my home computer with a single monitor to my work computer that has a dual monitor setup. Sometimes the windows that I want are on the second monitor. If you can see your taskbar (the bar at the bottom of the screen with the start menu), and the window you want to show is on the taskbar as an icon, you can right click on the icon and select 'Move' from the menu. This will give you a cursor with arrows pointing in four directions. Then tap an arrow key (such as up or left) on your keyboard. Then as you move your mouse the window will come into view.

In certain situations, however, the window may not be showing up in the taskbar, so it is a little more tricky. The first step is to try to make it the active window. Holding Alt and then pressing Tab will allow you to cycle through the active windows. Keep pressing tab until you get to the window you would like to move. Then let go of Alt. Now you can use the following key combinations to show the window's menu. First tap alt on your keyboard once. Then tap the up arrow key, and then tap the left arrow key. You should now see a menu. Hit the down arrow key until 'Move' is highlighted, and then press 'Enter'. Now move your mouse and you should see your window. So again, once the window is highlighted, Alt,Up,Left is the key sequence to get to the window's menu.

I hope this helps someone!