Mendeley
A free reference manager to organise papers, annotate PDFs and create citations.
What is Mendeley?
Mendeley is a free reference manager from Elsevier. Store your research papers, read and annotate PDFs, and add citations and bibliographies to your writing.
Think of it as a research bookshelf that also handles citations.
What you can do with it
- Library: store and organise papers
- Annotate PDFs: highlight and add notes
- Cite: plugin for Word
- Sync: across devices
Get started in 3 steps
- Go to mendeley.com and sign up free
- Install Mendeley Reference Manager
- Add papers and use the Cite plugin in Word
Try this today
- Import 5 PDFs and organise them
- Highlight key findings in a paper
- Insert citations into a Word document
Good to know
- Free: with storage limits
- Word plugin: for citations
- Alternative to Zotero: choose one and stick with it
Quick challenge
Organise all the PDFs for one project into a Mendeley folder!
Picked by the Scrollwell team · updated 25 Oct 2026. Mendeley is run by its own company — read its privacy terms before you add learners' names or marks.