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Connect Mendeley and your entire reference library becomes searchable in Anara alongside any PDFs you have uploaded. Ask questions that draw on your full collection at once. For biologists, chemists, and clinical researchers who manage their references in Mendeley and want to start working with their papers without re-uploading them one by one.

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1. Describe the task

Your references are in Mendeley. You have spent months building that library: tagging papers, organizing collections, annotating what matters. Uploading them again to another tool means either a one-by-one drag session or abandoning the organization you already have. Connecting Mendeley to Anara brings your existing library into scope without the upload. You connect once via your Mendeley account, select the collection you want to work with, approve the import, and the papers are searchable in Anara alongside anything else you upload directly. From there, you can ask questions across the whole collection, generate citations, draft synthesis sections, and verify claims against your own papers, all using the same library you already maintain. One important characteristic of the sync: it is a snapshot taken at the time of connection, not a live feed. If you add new papers to Mendeley after syncing, you need to reimport to bring those papers into Anara. Keeping this in mind prevents the common situation of asking Anara about a paper that is in Mendeley but was added after the last sync. Here a clinical researcher in molecular biology has three years of papers organized in Mendeley collections by protein target and needs to start synthesizing across them without rebuilding the organization from scratch. 
I have just connected my Mendeley library. My collection "CFTR Channel Function" contains thirty-two papers I have been collecting since my PhD program began.

Search across this collection and answer: what is the current state of the mechanistic evidence on how CFTR channel gating is regulated by phosphorylation? Specifically, which papers in my collection address the role of the R domain, and what are the main points of agreement and disagreement across those studies?

Cite the specific papers and passages for every claim. If any claim requires a paper not in my collection, tell me rather than filling the gap from your general knowledge.

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2. Give Anara context

Required context
  • A connected Mendeley account. Connect Mendeley from the Anara integrations settings before running the prompt.
Optional context
  • The specific Mendeley collection to import. If you have multiple collections, naming one scopes the import to that subset rather than your full library.
  • Papers you have uploaded directly to Anara that overlap with your Mendeley collection. Anara searches both sources together without duplication.

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3. What Anara creates

Access to your Mendeley collection as a searchable library in Anara, plus an answer to the first question you ask across it. After the initial import you work with the collection the same way you would with papers you uploaded directly: targeted questions, cross-paper synthesis, citation generation, claim verification, note creation. The import is a one-time step that makes every subsequent workflow available against your existing reference collection.

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4. Follow-up prompts

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Generate APA citations for a subset of the collection

When you need a reference list from the papers you are working with. 
Generate APA 7 citations for all papers in my collection that are referenced in the synthesis you just produced. Format as a numbered reference list.

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Sync in newly added papers

When you have added papers to Mendeley after the initial import. 
I have added twelve new papers to my Mendeley "CFTR Channel Function" collection since the last import. Re-import the collection so Anara has the current version. Then tell me which of the new papers are most relevant to the question of R domain phosphorylation.

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Search across two collections at once

When your research question spans multiple Mendeley collections. 
I have now imported both my "CFTR Channel Function" collection and my "ABC Transporter Mechanisms" collection. Search across both and identify the papers that discuss shared structural features relevant to both CFTR and other ABC transporters. I am preparing for a comparison section of my dissertation.

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5. Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting

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How you word your prompt shapes what you get

After importing a collection, scope your first question to that collection explicitly: “in my Mendeley collection” or “in the papers you just imported.” Without this instruction, Anara may search your broader library including directly uploaded papers and return results that blur the two sources. For targeted synthesis across a specific Mendeley collection, folder-scoped search produces more consistent results than a whole-library query. If the import covered a very large collection (more than 200 papers), breaking your first question into sub-topics produces better coverage than one broad question.

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Check the output against your own understanding

The Mendeley connector imports paper metadata and any PDFs that are attached to your Mendeley records. Papers in your Mendeley library that do not have attached PDFs will have their metadata available but will not have full-text passage retrieval. This means a citation can appear in the search results with abstract-level information but cannot provide a clicked-through passage citation. For tiles that depend on passage-level verification (claim checking, appraisal table filling), the full-text PDF needs to be available in the Mendeley record or uploaded separately to Anara.

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What to do with the output next

Once the collection is imported and your first synthesis session is complete, save the results as a note in Anara with the collection name and date in the title. When you add new papers to Mendeley, reimport before your next session so the library stays current. For ongoing projects where the Mendeley collection grows regularly, a reimport at the start of each major writing session ensures Anara is working from your current library rather than a stale snapshot.