Brad Hall

Mendeley is a free and excellent resource to manage references for your research article. With Mendeley, you can do a variety of functions that will make research publication easier, especially when conducting a literature review. The first item on your Mendeley to-do list is curating your Mendeley library. Any research articles or other references you want to use in your article should be added to the library. You can drag and drop them into the open desktop application from your desktop or files folder. Sometimes, you will add duplicate documents to your library. Under ‘Tools,’ click ‘Check for Duplicates.’ You can merge duplicate documents. Select all duplicate documents and in the upper right corner, click on merge. From there, Mendeley will check the fields to verify information; click on ‘Confirm Merge’ to complete the process.

The style of your work is just as important as its content. You should write for your audience — a professor, a layperson, your colleagues, etc — and your style should indicate who you are writing for. Slang words and other colloquial terms should not be used unless they are relevant to your article’s focus. It is also essential to avoid biased language; you don’t want your article to be seen as sexist, racist, or stereotypical. Your article should be written intelligently. Having a peer who had not read your article before will help you with proofreading. You may be able to cut down on redundant information or add information for completeness when necessary with his or her feedback. Sometimes it is necessary to use jargon — vocabulary used by a specific group of people. When using jargon, you should define the word so that a general audience would be able to understand what it means.