Introduction to Mendeley Advisors Webinar

Introduction to Mendeley Advisors Webinar

2020, Jun 29    

This webinar was run for the benefit of Mendeley advisors. I thought I might run a session on citation and referencing for students and so went to this webinar for a refresher on the advisor programme.

The webinar was presented by Dr Rob Moore, an AP at Old Dominion University, USA, and Rachel Brennesholtz, Head of Mendeley advisors programme at Elsevier in Amsterdam, who gave an introduction.

Why Mendeley, and how to introduce it

Rob cited the principal advantage of Mendeley over Zotero as the ability to annotated the pdfs within the app. He talked about some of the “gotchas” in Mendeley, specifically, getting the title right on import of a citation, and the inconsistency with author names.

He then discussed his demonstration approach when showing Mendeley to new users, which starts with input of several citations, showing the immediate build of the bibliography files. He then moved to demonstration of annotation of pdfs on an iPad.

The advisor community

Rachel told us about the world-wide community of advisors and users, and shared some statistics on its reach - 22,000 students were introduced to it in about 300 events in 2019. She shared a links to the advisor community1 and advised us to email community-@-mendeley.com2 if the advisor badge doesn’t show on your profile.

Benefits of the programme include expanded network storage (7.5 GB) and exclusive product updates and webinars. There’s merchandise, too (t-shirts, pens and stickers, etc). You have to register an event to get these, which can be online or in person. The Mendeley event can be part of other events (such as sessions on citation and referencing for example). Allow 4 weeks to get your stuff from Amsterdam.

Resources

Rachel winged it a bit as her slides froze, but then got on to showing the PowerPoint slides and other materials available to support training sessions put on by advisors.

Next steps

I’ve been prompted by a colleague today to make a video on note-taking using Cornell and sketch noting, both of which I use and teach as part of my work at Moray House. My colleague also shared this YouTube video of someone doing this, without actually understanding how the Cornell system works: like a lot of YouTube channel stars, that presenter knows about the product without understanding the process, which is the important part. I think I might also make a separate video or session on citing with Mendeley for academic writing.

Notes and references

  1. The advisors portal is here

  2. Remove the hyphens for the correct address.