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Mendeley

Mendeley is a reference manager tool to help collect, organise, cite and share references.

Why use Mendeley?

Mendeley is a free and user-friendly reference manager that allows you to collect, organise, cite, and share references. It consists of two components that can be used together or separately: Mendeley Reference Manager Desktop and Mendeley Reference Manager Web.

Features of Mendeley include:

  • Works with word processing applications such as Microsoft Word and LibreOffice to create citations and bibliographies
  • Store, annotate and highlight PDFs from within your library
  • Enables collaboration and sharing
  • Webpages/citations can be captured using the Web Importer (web version only)
  • With a free personal Mendeley account, users receive 2 GB of storage for personal documents, and 100 MB for shared web storage.

The new Mendeley Reference Manager (2:24 mins) by Mendeley (YouTube)

Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE)

Note: From December 2025, Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) will no longer be available. If you currently have an RMIT University MIE account, this will impact personal and shared storage limits, as well as group and collaborator allowances.

You can switch to a Mendeley "free" account by changing your RMIT email address to a personal one in your Mendeley account settings, or for alternatives to Mendeley, we recommend exploring Endnote and Zotero. 

Not sure if Mendeley is right for you?

Choosing a reference manager

A module that will help you decide which tool to use to organise your references. It explores the features of three popular reference managers: EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley.

Common features of reference managers

Some common features of reference managers include:

  • Save references from LibrarySearch, Databases and Google Scholar
  • Auto-generate citations and bibliographies in word processing applications
  • Attach and annotate PDFs and other files 
  • Share collections of references with others
  • Available in a desktop version and an online version
  • Sync your references across multiple devices

Changing reference managers

EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley make it easy to change to another reference manager. Note: While citations will be copied, PDFs of articles may not be exported.

Learn more about reference managers

Installing and support

Installing

Support

Related guides