It's taken an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to quickly add arbitrary text to an in-text citation with Mendeley's Word plug-in. Until this week, most (all?) of my submitted manuscripts have had sections that looked like this:
That annoying )( doesn't look great, but it was even more annoying to try and type inside the left parenthesis, the deal with the pop-up from Mendeley asking if I wanted to keep the manual edit every single time I re-opened the word document.
To add arbitrary text, click on the citation, then click on the "Edit Citation" button in the Mendeley toolbar. This brings up the citation editor.
Click on the first citation in the series, and a new set of options appears in the window below. You can then type in any arbitrary text:
Then when you click OK, Mendeley happily adds the text to the document:
Obviously, you don't want to have it twice, so you can get rid of the first one, to end up with a nicely formatted, non-annoying citation:
