Create your Mendeley bibliography database
Create your folder of PDFs first
The first thing to do is to import the PDFs of research papers into Mendeley Desktop. You can do this manually by using the "Add Document" button on the interface or you can import existing EndNote XML, RIS, or BibTex files.
You can also drag and drop your PDFs into Mendeley Desktop, where it will then extract the document details, keywords and cited references. It also looks up Cross-Ref DOIs, arXiv IDs and PubMed document details automatically.
Your library of PDFs will all be neatly and intuitively organized. You can search through your bibliography manager and filter by author, journal, keywords and even by assigning your own tags. This gives you immediate and quick access to your documents. Mendeley will even suggest papers not in your library which are similar in content or context.
To make life even easier, Mendeley can also take care of renaming your papers to more user-friendly file names. The bibliography manager can automatically rename all of your files to the same name format such as "Author - Title.pdf", making it even easier to manage your research papers. There is also the folder monitoring tool, which allows Mendeley Desktop to automatically import any new files that you place into your selected folders.
You can access your Mendeley bibliography from any computer by having an online account. This means that whatever operating system you are using and wherever you are in the world, you can manipulate your bibliography and access it with ease.
Now you can annotate your PDFs
Open and read PDFs in the internal PDF viewer. You can view PDFs in glorious full-screen mode, and the search-as-you-type function allows you to discover all instances of your search term immediately.
You can highlight text with the text marker tool and add sticky notes to capture your thoughts. In the next release (v0.9.6) these annotations can also be synchronized with enabling you to share comments on reading material for your research projects.
Now you can manage and view everything in one place: Bibliographic data, PDFs, PDF annotations and highlights, cited references, searchable full-text, keywords, and your tags.