Mendeley is a reference manager software founded in 2007 by PhD students Paul Foeckler, Victor Henning, Jan Reichelt and acquired by the Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier in 2013.

The company Mendeley, named after the German-Czech biologist Gregor Mendel and the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev,[3] was founded in London in November 2007 by three German PhD students.

The company's investors included some people previously involved with Last.fm, Skype, and Warner Music Group,[4] as well as academicians from Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.In 2009, Mendeley won several awards including Plugg.eu "European Start-up of the Year 2009",[5][6] TechCrunch Europas "Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society 2009",[7] and The Guardian ranked it #6 in "Top 100 tech media companies".

[14] David Dobbs, in The New Yorker, suggested Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley could have been to acquire its user data and/or to "destroy or co opt an open-science icon that threatens its business model.

On 12 January 2015, Mendeley announced the acquisition of Newsflo, a service which provided links to press coverage of researchers' work.

In April 2016, Mendeley Data, a platform for sharing citable research datasets online, was promoted out of beta.

On the local computer side, it works in conjunction with a word processor plug-in, or add-in (mandatory), and a desktop application (now facultative for the latest current version).

Institutional, or premium, accounts also exist providing extra storage space to their users (academics, universities, research organisms, subscribing companies…).

Both desktop applications support various additional functionalities such as multiple PDFs local annotations, and ideas organisation, using the Mendeley Notebook.

[24] Only the desktop apps (Windows, macOS, and Linux) allow to export all the references in one shot as a text file.

The "Mendeley Reference Manager" desktop app works fine with macOS recent versions (Ventura, Sonoma), but as it is not yet optimized for the new mac family equipped with the Apple silicon M-series SoC processors, it requires the automatic installation of Rosetta 2 to run.

Rosetta 2 is a dynamic binary translator which converts on the fly the instructions written for the Intel x86-64 processor family to the SoC (System on a Chip) of the new Apple M-series.

The software can track reader counts, a readership statistic which has been asserted to predict citation impact,[27] whereas journal-level metrics are poor predictors of reliability.