Here at Mendeley we’ve been hard at work trying to improve the product for our community, which now has well over 2 million researchers around the world. This includes a better onboarding wizard that takes new users through the tools available on the platform. The wizard also includes an expanded ‘Claim your Publications’ feature that enables Mendeley to link user profile pages to the wider catalog when they access Mendeley for the first time.

Some might say that this is one of our finest-looking desktops yet, but we’ll leave that judgment to you. As usual, we’ve focused a lot of attention in making the user experience as smooth as it can possibly be, improving looks and flow under windows 8 and fixing a few bugs, including:

• Added options for obtaining help or checking for updates
• More effective display of non-English text in the documents list
• Fixed problem with crashing plugin in Word 2003 and OS X 10.5
• Accurate progress indicator when importing large RIS, BibTeX and EndNote XML files

You can download the new v1.8 Mendeley Desktop here. This version supports Mac OSX 10.5 and above, Linux Ubuntu 10.04, Debian Squeeze or equivalent, and Windows XP SP2 or later. We hope you like the changes, but as always we really value your opinion, so don’t be shy… Let us know what you think in the UserVoice forum, and if you have any problems just contact our support team.

Image via kalyan02

We’re very happy to announce the release of the first true “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” citation style editor for open source CSL citation styles – produced in collaboration with Columbia University Libraries and supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Most academic journals insist that papers submitted to them conform to the journal’s own idiosyncratic style of citing research. This has led to a proliferation of thousands of different citation styles, often with only minuscule differences in things like the placement of commas or use of italics. To support their users in this arduous task, modern reference management tools like ours ship with 2789 different citation styles for use when formatting a bibliography in Word or Open Office.

It turns out that 2789 was still not enough! (more…)

At Mendeley, we’re all about easy collaboration in the cloud, so of course we’re delighted that Hojoki has added us as an activity source. Hojoki lets you see all the activity from all your cloud apps in one shared stream, and share filtered subsets of those activities with colleagues & co-workers. It’s a great way to keep on top of what everyone is doing without having to separately watch Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote, Github, and your various Mendeley group activity feeds. It was actually silly fun watching the live feed, too. As people went about their daily work editing documents and scheduling appointments in folders and calendars I’m subscribed to, they showed up in in nearly real-time on my Hojoki feed.

To celebrate the addition of Mendeley (beta only for now), we’re doing a t-shirt giveaway of these awesome shirts featuring the Hojoki robot and Mendeley. Watch #mendeley for your chance to win one & if you haven’t tried Hojoki yet, give it a try.

The most laborious part of any research paper for me, and probably for many of you, is making sure that the references are formatted in the proper style. Is the title supposed to be in italics? Do I need a period or a comma here? It has always seemed like exactly the kind of thing that a computer should be able to do for me, and now with Mendeley it can. Mendeley uses a system for formatting references called the Citation Style Language (CSL), which is sort of like HTML, but for citations. With Mendeley, you simply tell your word processor what citation style you want (picking from a library of thousands of styles) and our word processor plugin handles the rest. (more…)

UPDATE: The RFIs have now been posted and there’s a petition opposing the RWA on whitehouse.gov.

The US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently issued a Request for Information on their existing policy requiring some federally-funded work to be submitted to Pubmed Central, where it’s freely accessible to the public. We were pleased to have the opportunity to respond and a summary of our response is below. Before getting into that, however, I’d like to take a little detour and talk a little about our mission and how that relates to the scholarly endeavor. Our mission at Mendeley is to help researchers organize research, collaborate easily with colleagues, and discover new research. (more…)

The new year brings some big news! We’ve partnered with Swets, a leading subscription management company, to create the Mendeley Institutional Edition. This tool will allow librarians and institutions to connect their collection directly to researchers; aid collaboration among students, professors, and colleagues; and see the impact of the institution’s research output.

Within their institutional profile, librarians can assist their users in a number of ways:
(more…)

Keeping with the Open Access week spirit, we’re taking this opportunity to show you how to publicly share your own research on Mendeley. Making it openly available for others to easily access means they are more likely to cite you in their own publications, and also allows your colleagues to build upon your work faster.

When you sign up for a Mendeley user account, a researcher profile is created for you. On this page, along with your name, academic status, and short bio, you will also see a section titled “Publications”. This section is where you can display work you’ve published or perhaps even work that’s not yet published.

So how do you add your publications to that list? Just drop your papers into the My Publications folder in Mendeley Desktop. Let me show you how, step by step. (more…)

At Mendeley, we want to fit into your workflow as seamlessly as possible. We recently posted an article showing you 7 ways to add documents to your library, so I’m pleased to announce that there’s now yet another way. Publishers such as Highwire Press, BMC, PLoS, Arxiv, Refdoc.fr and others have rolled out a “Share This” button for their sites, which makes adding research to your library as easy as sending a tweet. Read on to see how this works. (more…)

Here’s a problem some of you may be familiar with. You’re browsing the Mendeley research catalog and you come across a really great paper, or maybe you see an update from one of your colleagues pointing to something you’d like to read, only to find that you have to leave Mendeley to log in to your library’s website and search all over again to be able to download the actual paper. It’s a little jarring to switch interfaces like that, and more than a little inefficient. Fret no more, my friends. (more…)

This post is the third post in a series of posts designed to introduce you to the new information organization, discovery, and retrieval concepts in Mendeley. In part 1 we discussed tags and filters and in part 2 we discussed the idea of search as an interface to your research. Today I’d like to talk a little about another feature that has become common to information organization and discovery tools – the activity feed.

The benefits of online research are obvious (more…)