Skip to Main Content

Mendeley Reference Manager: Viewing and Annotating PDFs

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

Annotate PDFs

  1. Open a PDF in Mendeley's PDF viewer by double clicking on it in the central pane.
  2. Add highlights and notes by clicking on the Highlight or Note buttons on the menu.

Share Your Annotations

You can share your annotations with your co-workers:

  1. Open a PDF that is part of a Group
  2. Make your annotations
  3. Sync these annotations to Mendeley Web by going back to "My Library" and clicking on "Sync Library"

Note

Your annotations are not stored in the actual PDF file, but rather in your Mendeley account.  To create a new PDF file that contains all annotations, you can export the PDF with all its annotations by choosing:  File > Export with Annotations from within the Mendeley PDF viewer.