Free webinar on "Mendeley; A Reference Management Tool" organized by Department of Electronics Engineering

A free webinar workshop on “Mendeley Reference Managing Tool” was organized by the Department of Electronics Final Year Project Committee on 9th July 2020 as second online webinar from the series. The presenter for the seminar was Dr. Attiya Baqai Convener ES-FYPC & Associate Professor in Department of Electronics Engineering MUET.

The seminar started in the name of Allah. Dr. Attiya Baqai welcomed the participants while appreciating their regular participation in the webinar series arranged by FYPC of Department of Electronics Engineering. She briefed about the need and importance of reference management tools available; for research paper and thesis writing. The session was accompanied by the interactive exercise activities in which the students were first taught about the concepts using different features and utilities of the Mendeley software and then were asked to complete different tasks at run time. The activities included installing MS Word and Web importer plugins through Mendeley, searching references in Mendeley through literature search from database, through browsers & Google scholar, directly importing references from pdf files or complete folders, making watch folder. The students were also given task to cite references and later change citation styles and insert bibliography using word plugin. Last activity was to use import and export feature. The students were asked to import and export files from different reference managers like BibTex *.bib, Reference Information System *.ris, Endnote .xml or Zotero zotero.sqlite. Dr. Attiya also highlighted the role of built-in pdf viewer and its features like adding notes, annotating & highlighting text right from Mendeley software. She encouraged students to share and discuss their search or literature review section with their FYP group members through this feature.

Other features like collaboration with other researchers, creating groups, discovering statistics and recommending articles were also briefly touched during this online workshop.

The statistics of the feedback forms filled by the students were maintained high as for the first webinar and the students rated this seminar as 4.45 on average out of 5. The two hour technical session was followed by half an hour Question and Answer session and the seminar ended with vote of thanks by the resource person to all the attendees.