How to use Mendeley when writing a paper/citing articles?

I am writing this post to help my residents/researchers in writing their papers for publication. When I started out, I did not have the best tools to succeed, but thanks to my colleagues, mentors, and a LOT of people, I learned a lot and now I have a small number of publications. 

To help everyone, I am going to break this post down into steps.

1. Create an account and install Mendeley- It is a free citation software that you can download here

2. Once installed log into your account. You can drag and drop the paper to your account and the beauty of Mendeley is that it GENERALLY auto-recognizes the paper and adds the name title to it. For example the pdf file on your desktop maybe this 

But Mendeley will rename it to this 

which is extremely helpful to realize what the paper is on rather than trying to rename every pdf file/article that you download off the internet. 

3. In Mendeley, go to Tools and install Mendeley Cite for Microsoft Word.

4. Start writing your paper in MS Word and once you want to cite something go to References, where you should see something called Mendeley Cite-> Click on it (it will ask you to log in again)-> Click the papers you want to cite and then click 'Insert citation'

It should look something like this 

5. Now you can keep it as noted above or you can change the citation style to something different like the AMA 11th edition, which is a numbers reference technique by doing the following steps

6. In the end, insert your bibliography by doing the following 

7. Voila-> You have just learned the art of writing a manuscript and citing articles.

Please note, that people also use EndNote, Zotero, and many other citation software. Some of them are paid and I am NOT very well-versed in them, hence I will not try explaining them either. Hopefully, this small tutorial will be helpful to the multitude of researchers and residents out there :) 

The video version of this can be found here.