Mendeley

Searching for your Tags

In addition to the fields you can search from the dropdown option in Mendeley Desktop, you can also search by tag. Simply type Tag:copyrightTag:"information literacy" (put phrases in quotes), or Tag:[your tag] in the search box:

Screen shot of search box in Mendeley with dropdown options visible, including Authors, Titles, Publication Names, Year, and Notes

Your results will show in a single folder that you search or in the All Documents folder: 

Screenshot of results of searching based on the Tag option (not pictured above)

Organizing your Hard Drive Files

Using the File Organizer, drag and drop the fields you want to appear in your Mendeley Desktop document files. I use Author and Year, but you may wish to also use the Title or the Journal. If you have multiple files by the same author in the same year, Mendeley will automatically number your files instead of overwriting them. If you do not like the hypen-separated default in your file names, check out the options on the dropdown menu on the right and see my example of underscore-separated file name structure in the Windows image below. The other options are comma or period separated values. You can also sort the folder's contents into subfolders. See the Windows image below.

Mac

From the Mendeley Desktop menu, click on Preferences > File Organizer

Screen shot of Mac Preferences > File Organizer

Windows

On a Windows computer, click Tools > Options > File Organizer.

Screen shot of Windows > Options > File Organizer