I have read half this forum and I am still quite lost :/.
What I would like to achieve:
Add some plaintext to Scrivener (temporary citation?)
After compiling to docx, this temporary citation would be an actual Mendeley citation, so that the bibliography would be autogenerated.
If a go to Mendeley and try to copy a citation I cannot copy it directly to Scrivener. It does work to copy it to notepad and then copy this back to Scrivener. After that if I compile to docx, I just get the citation as plaintext in Word and not an actual Mendeley citation that gets automatically added to the bibiography.
I would really very helpful if anyone could give any hint .
You need to read how Mendeley wants you to insert temporary citations in another software, like a citekey or something similar. It’s not Scrivener who handles the references, it’s the bibliography software.
After exporting to Word, it’s usually the reference handling software who’s supposed to do the transformation to correct citations and bibliography.
Mendeley forces you to use either Word or LibreOffice if you want to cite your work: mendeley.com/guides/mendeley-cite — I found nothing in their support pages for how to access temporary citations at all. I made an account and tried Mendeley a few weeks ago, it is like the baby Duplo of reference management, a simplistic carrot to tie-in to the Elsevier empire. So as far as I can tell, the workflow is non-existent: use Endnote or Zotero or something else.
Colwiz (now wizdom.ai), from another academic publisher does at least offer temporary citations that are somewhat accessible: wizdom.ai/download — it offers more features than Mendeley as far as I can tell. Readcube Papers (aka Papers 4, lunk, any thoughts?) should also have more features, but I haven’t tested it (Papers 3 used to allow a good workflow with Scrivener, not sure about the online replacement). All of these are webapps, basically webpages that run in a container on the desktop, and so all of them have poor integration and few features. If you are stuck on Windows, then really see if you can use Endnote (it is at least a real program!), or something like Bookends on macOS… Considering how important a reference manager can be (curating all your academic knowledge), relying on poor quality software just because it is free is a false economy IMHO…
It seems if you are willing to switch to a Scrivener+Pandoc workflow, then Mendeley can work just fine, as it offers the ability to sync to a bibtex file and creates the citekeys used in temporary citations:
.