What is Mendeley Reference Manager?

The solutions we offer must address challenges you face in your daily reality. It’s become increasingly difficult to keep developing the original Mendeley Desktop in the way we and you need. The new Mendeley Reference Manager is built with the latest technology that will allow us to provide regular updates and to act on user feedback at an accelerated rate.

We have also introduced some new features, such as Mendeley Notebook, and refreshed the look of the interface so that it is simpler for you to perform your key reference management tasks.

We have also built Mendeley Cite, a new citation add-in for Microsoft® Word. The new citation add-in now exists as a standalone application, which means that you can use it without having to open or even install Mendeley Reference Manager, as well being able to use it with online versions of Word.

While we work hard to bring all the features you use and care about to Mendeley Reference Manager, Mendeley Desktop is still available for use. Mendeley Web Library was replaced with Mendeley Reference Manager on September 07, 2020. We have now stopped all development work on Mendeley Desktop, and there will be no further updates to Mendeley Desktop beyond the current version. Our full development effort is now focused on the new Mendeley Reference Manager so that we can add the features users are telling us they want.

Once we are confident that the new Mendeley Reference Manager meets our users' reference management needs we will start to begin the migration process by notifying you via emails and other forms of communication. To migrate over to the new Mendeley Reference Manager, you will need to make sure you have synced your current Mendeley Desktop and then download the new Mendeley Reference Manager. Having synced your Desktop, all of your work will then exist in the new Mendeley Reference Manager.

Key to helping us make the decision of when to start the migration is user feedback. The feedback we receive from users is vital in helping us make the right product development decisions. To provide feedback, open Mendeley Reference Manager, go to ‘Account & Help’ and select ‘Give Feedback’.

The new Mendeley Reference Manager library is cloud-based. This is to ensure your latest changes are always saved and that you can access your references on multiple devices. If you would like a specific file attachment stored locally, you can download that file to your local machine by opening it in the reader and selecting the download icon. We are also already looking at ways to improve support for local file storage and will have updates out soon.