Mendeley is a free* reference manager and academic social network. It allows users to gather research, read and annotate PDFs, organize citations, and create bibliographies easily.
Mendeley offers a word citation plug-in to quickly send bibliographies into word documents and is compatible with most browsers. There's also a Mendeley mobile app you can download to your device. Available for Android and iOS.
On the social network side, Mendeley allows users to upload their own papers and articles and share them with other users within the community. "Friending" other users allows you to share your work as well as work collaboratively with others in building bibliographies and collecting research.
*A basic Mendeley account is free, but only includes 2 gigabytes of storage. Additional storage and features are available for a monthly fee
In order to export your bibliography or insert citations into Word, you'll need first make sure you have your Mendeley Desktop version up.
Now you can insert citations using the Insert Citation option, or add your bibliography using the Insert Bibliography option.
There are 2 ways to download citations into Mendeley:
To upload a document to your library, click the blue "+Add" button on the top left side of your screen. This option lets you import a document from your computer, manually enter a citation, or import a citation that you've saved in .xml, .ris, or .bib format. Select how you wish to add your citation and follow the prompts.
To save citations by web import, click the small red "M" located to the right of the website bar. Mendeley will work with almost all databases, including Clinical Key, Access Medicine, and even Google Scholar. Simply search for articles, click to open the articles or abstracts that you wish to save, then click the red "M".
*This method will not work with PubMed. Please check out the page on importing citations from PubMed for that.*
This will open the Web Importer pop-up. Be sure you have the citation selected and click "Add Mendeley". This will save the citation directly to your personal Mendeley Library.