There are many easy ways to add documents and/or citations to your Mendeley account. The steps for the following are below.
Very important note: All the citations added to your personal Mendeley library are also added to the database of citations that Mendeley shares with everyone. If you don't want a citation (e.g., unpublished papers, personal manuscripts) in your personal Mendeley library to be added to the crowd-sourced library, check Unpublished work at the bottom of the document details.
A quick and easy way to get citations into your Mendeley Library is to drag PDF files or folders of PDFs into the middle pane of Mendeley Reference Manager. Mendeley will attempt to extract the citation information from the PDFs, and the new citations will show up in under Recently Added.
You can also add your existing PDF files or folders to Mendelely using the Add new Files from computer(s) button.
Note: not all PDFs have information that can be extracted by Mendeley, and sometimes the citation information will be missing, incomplete, or incorrect. You may have to enter citation information manually or search the Mendeley catalog.
Look for an option like Export / Save Citation, then save or export the citation in RIS format. Depending on the database, either do Direct Export - Open With - Mendeley. Or, save the RIS file and import it into Mendeley by choosing File - Import (or drag the file into Mendeley Desktop).
You can also import citations from a database with the Web Importer bookmarklet. Just click on the Save to Mendeley button on your bookmarks toolbar when you are viewing a citation record or list of search results in a supported database. As you add the citation(s) to your Library, you can choose to put them in a particular folder.
Using the +Add new button (or Add references in Mendeley Web), select "Add Entry Manually".
With any citation generator, the occasional mistake might slip by. To correct records in your Mendeley Reference Manager library, simply click in the field you wish to update. You can also add tags or author keywords by clicking in the appropriate field.
You can search across the libraries of other Mendeley users to discover new papers on a topic. To do this, use the Literature Search option in Mendeley Desktop:
or you can click the magnifying glass in Mendeley Web to get to a Papers search:
