Trying to view citations in Bibtex as an import file from Mendely isn't working

Some comments and suggestions, in no particular order.

• Mendeley is a tool to help assemble a .bib file. It's important to realize that Mendeley does not, and will not, create a formatted bibliography. All it does it to help create the bib file(s).

• Creating the formatted bibliography for a LaTeX document is the job of BibTeX (or biblatex). BibTeX needs to be made aware of three key inputs:

  • The file that contains the raw bib inputs. This file must have filename extension .bib. The instruction bibliography should contain, in its argument, a list of one or more bib filenames, without the .bib extension.

  • Information about which formatting guidelines should be applied to the bib entries as well as to the citation call-outs. This information should be in the argument of a single bibliographystyle instruction. Bibliography style files must have exension .bst.

  • Which entries from the bib file(s) should actually be extracted and formatted? That's the job of the cite commands.

• Judging from your description, you have so far provided neither bibliography nor bibliographystyle instructions. You probably haven't run BibTeX either, right?

• Assuming appropriate bibliography and bibliographystyle instructions have been provided and assuming that various cite instructions are present in the tex file, and assuming the tex file is called myfile.tex, the compilation sequence should be

  latex myfile
  bibtex myfile
  latex myfile
  latex myfile
  

  Depending on your editing software, there may be a drop-down menu from which to choose latex and bibtex runs.

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Here's the output of a full MWE (minimum working example). It uses the plainnat bibliography style and the natbib citation management package. The bib entry is contained in a file called mybib.bib. Incidentally, there is an error in your bib entry: the argument of the month field should be either apr or {April}, but not {apr}.

RequirePackage{filecontents}
begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@article{Zumla2016,
author  = {Zumla, Alimuddin and Rao, Martin and Wallis, Robert S. and Kaufmann, Stefan H. E. and Rustomjee, Roxana and Mwaba, Peter and Vilaplana, Cris and Yeboah-Manu, Dorothy and Chakaya, Jeremiah and Ippolito, Giuseppe and Azhar, Esam and Hoelscher, Michael and Maeurer, Markus},
doi     = {10.1016/S1473-3099(16)00078-5},
issn    = {14733099},
journal = {The Lancet Infectious Diseases},
month   = apr,
number  = {4},
pages   = {E47--E63},
title   = {Host-directed therapies for infectious diseases: Current status, recent progress, and future prospects},
url     = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1473309916000785},
volume  = {16},
year    = {2016}
}
end{filecontents}

documentclass{article}
usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
bibliographystyle{plainnat}
usepackage{url}
usepackage[colorlinks,allcolors=blue]{hyperref}  % just for this example
begin{document}
cite{Zumla2016}
bibliography{mybib} % place the formatted bibliography *here*
end{document}