Hi Suzanne,
There are a couple of reasons why you are not getting the PDFs and associated meta-data. The first thing to check is that you are using the desktop version and not the online version of Mendeley. Linked PDFs in the online version are behind a firewall and are inaccessible to NVivo, so the documents are created as externals instead of importing the physical document. If you are not using the desktop version, you should download it, and it will synchronise with the online account and that will resolve the first issue.
The second thing to check is that PDF files are physically linked to a downloaded PDF and not linked to the online PDF because that still leaves the PDFs behind a firewall. In summary, if you are using the desktop version of Mendeley, and if the PDFs are correctly linked they will import perfectly into NVivo including the metadata.
The metadata for your ‘Externals’ is stored as ‘File Classification’ and you can link your imported PDF to that classification. However, I would recommend creating cases for your PDFs and exporting your current file classification to Excel and importing it as a case classification this will correctly link your PDFs and metadata without the need for manual entry of metadata and make it possible to run coding queries, compound queries and cross-tab queries as well as certain visualisations in NVivo that require case rather than file classifications to run. To export your file classification to Excel, right click on it and select ‘Export⇒Export Classification Sheet’.
I hope this response was helpful but do let me know if you need more information.
Kind regards,
Ben
