A Quick Mendeley Hack: Incorrect Citation-How to fix it?

Did it ever happen to you? That you downloaded a paper, then uploaded it to your Mendeley Desktop app and all of the details of that article are messed up? Or no details at all! Something like Figure 1.

Figure 1: An example of when Mendeley fails to auto-populate the details of the article from PDF metadata.

Well, it happens to me a lot. Sometimes, the details were not all the way correct for example wrong year, page number or issue number, etc. Those of us who use MS Word for writing, we can feel how difficult it is to go through each one of them and correct one by one.

What I used to do is that I used to download the reference files either in bib form or whatnot. Then, upload the bib file to my Mendeley and attach the pdf against it. It does not seem a lot when you do it for one or two papers but it can quickly scale up to a gigantic task.

Let me spell out a quick hack that I learned. If you can copy-paste the proper DOI in that little box and search click the search button, you can see for yourself what happens. See Figure 2 and Figure 3 for demonstration.

Figure 2: Fill out the DOI field and then click on the search option to the right.

Figure 3: Look it has found all the details properly! Also, this gives you a URL link to the online article!

Let me know if this hack makes your life a tiny bit easier haha! Spell out what's your hack that you discovered while using this tool.

Whatever I showed here might not be a great discovery, perhaps Mendeley has this mentioned somewhere in their "help" option, but who reads "help" anyway?? SO BORING!! As reading papers is not boring enough, right?

Writer:

Abdullah Saad PhD Candidate, School of Materials Engineering, Purdue University.