Many researchers use Mendeley to format citations as they’re writing papers, but what if you’re working on something a little less formal? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to drop a few citations into a comment or web form or some other application that doesn’t have the tight integration that’s available with Word or Open Office? There are a couple quick ways to grab a formatted citation using Mendeley: use the “copy formatted” option in Mendeley Desktop, grab it from the page in the research catalog, or just drag it into your application.
Option 1 – Copy Formatted
If you’re writing an email or using online collaborative software and need to get a few citations, you can right click on a selection from your library (or just do a quick Ctrl-C) and it’s ready for you to paste from the system clipboard. It will be formatted according to the citation style you’ve selected.
Option 2 – Grab it from the catalog
If you’ve found a paper while searching the research catalog, you don’t have to add it to you library to get a formatted citation. We’ve included 8 of the most common styles right there on the page.
Some Mac users (Office 2011 for Mac) may see a floating Zotero toolbar when opening Word. Alternatively, the Zotero tools may be accessed from the 'scripts' menu. This will bring up the insert citation dialog you saw when inserting the citation. If you see a Red Search Bar, click on the reference you need to edit, and then enter any. How to Format References in APA Style using Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac OSX. « How to do 'find and replace' within currently selected text in Microsoft Word 2011.
Option 3 – Just drag it over
This works the same as Option 1, but might be even easier, depending on your workflow. Instead of doing right-click & copy, you can just drag the item or items into your application to have the formatted citations inserted at your current cursor position.
For more heavy-duty use, we’ve got a nifty embed feature that allows you to embed a dynamically-updating list of publications wherever you can put HTML, and if you’re on WordPress, you might want to check out the Mendeley plugins for WordPress.
You can use these tips to add citations to word processing software that we don’t currently support, such as Pages, Google Docs, Scrivener, etc. What word processing software do you use? Let us know in the comments.