Join our Citizen Cyberlab public bibliography!

Post by Cindy Regalado and Diana Mastracci.

Join our Mendeley Citizen Cyberlab repository of online resources on citizen science to gain access to a collection of over 500 references for books, articles, websites, and reports on citizen science, citizen science projects, and related themes such as education, learning, creativity, challenges to engagement, crowdsourcing, participatory methods, and more! Join, share articles, add references, and help us to reshape our word cloud to reflect what is of greatest importance in your research as citizen scientists.

How to get started with Mendeley:

First, visit our group Citizen Cyberlab on Mendeley. On the top right corner you will see a green button “Join this group”; click on it and in three easy steps, namely ‘Create a free account’, ‘Tell us your interests’, and ‘Start using Mendeley’ you will not only have access to more than 500 references but will also be able share with the group other resources that are of interest to you, and join other groups to tap into and add to their collections.

Second, download Mendeley desktop (for Windows or Mac), the program from where add, edit, change, and tag your library resources. Tip: whenever you make changes to your library, don’t forget to sync it! Do this my clicking the “Sync” button on the top right of your Mendeley desktop programme.

Third, install the Web Importer so that when you are visiting the website of an interesting resource, you can quickly add it your library in just two clicks! Tip: if the information cannot be extracted from your browser, you can edit it in your Mendeley desktop programme.

Now, you are done! For more tips and advice, visit the Mendeley tutorials page.

How we’ve been making sense of our library:

You can begin by visiting the Mendeley tutorials page for step-by-step videos on how to use your new library. Part of organising the collection of resources involves identifying key terms that represent important aspects of these resources as the ones in our word cloud above. These words then become the tags that help to categorise the entries in your library without worrying about creating folders. The tags for the Citizen Cyberlab on Mendeley can be seen just below the green button “Join this group” button; it is an easy way to browse through the group’s collection.

In your Mendeley desktop programme, you will notice three panes. The one on the left lists your library and groups. When selecting “All documents” from your left pane, you will see the list of your references – when selecting a group from your left pane, you will see three tabs in your centre pane: ‘Overview’, ‘Documents’, and ‘Members’. When selecting a document from the middle pane, the pane on the right will display details about it such as title, year, abstract, tags, etc.

This centre pane also has a section for ‘Notes’; a tab on the top of this third pane. You will notice that some papers have been ‘starred’; these are papers which have been selected as important and/or have been annotated. Anyone who is member of the group can star, tag, and annotate any entry on our publicly available Mendeley group Citizen Cyberlab!

Final tip: you can add resoruces manually using Mendeley desktop by selecting which group or folder you want them to go into. When importing resources to your library from you’re your browser, be sure to select the destination. If this is not chosen, the papers will be sent automatically to ‘My library’. To move them using Mendeley desktop:

– open your ‘my library’ folder from the left side pane

– the papers in that folder should appear in the centre section of the programme; select the papers arrow+shift or ctrl for multiple select

– use your pointer to drag and drop into the Citizen Cyberlab folder on the left pane

– press sync button at the top, below the menu bar (press it twice just to be sure)

– then after a few seconds (maybe a minute) after you’ve synced you should see, in the centre pane, the uploaded papers when you click and open the Citizen Cyberlab folder.

More information can be found in the Mendeley support portal.

Enjoy!