Mendeley and Styles

Mendeley calls referencing styles such as APA and Vancouver Citation Styles. These styles are rules for exactly how references should be written; what information should be included, in what order.

Which style should you use?

Check with your School, supervisor or lecturer if they have a preferred style. For more information on the various styles see the Referencing section of the Library's Guides web page.

Information about the different Reference styles

When you download the Mendeley program to your computer it comes with a small number of the most popular output styles, also used at UWA. However these styles may not always output references which match the UWA approved styles detailed in the Library Referencing Guides. Please refer to the Guides under the link Referencing to learn more.

The Library has created a customised style for the Vancouver.Referencing Style (based on Citing Medicine). This style can be downloaded from the table below and imported into your Mendeley Desktop program.

1. Click on View>Citation Style>More Styles....

   

2. Click on the Get More Styles tab
3. Search for the style by name, or paste the link for the style into the Download Style box and click Download

Mendeley supports over 6,000 different referencing styles.  A complete list of the citation styles available in Mendeley can be found at https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26107/supporthub/mendeley/~/what-citation-styles-are-available-in-mendeley%3F/

Styles are stored as .csl (Citation Style Language) files and can be found in the GitHub repository.

To download a style

1. Open the GitHub repository of citation styles
2. Click on the Find file button
3. Start typing the name of the style you need
4. Click on the link to the style in the list
5. Click on the Raw button
6. Copy the URL for the new page which should be displaying the XML text version of the .csl file
7. Follow the instructions in Importing a Style into Mendeley above