Upload Space

When we first cleared out some room on our servers to allow you to upload PDFs to your private Mendeley Web account, we spared 500 MB per person, given that PDFs are usually around 1-2 MB, this  enables you to store 250-500 PDF documents online. In response to requests (or should we say popular demand?) as well as bulging research collections, we will increase the storage space as part of a premium package in early 2010 (we are also working on more detailed stats, a recommendation engine and some other nice features).

For the growing number of people who really can’t wait that long (hats off to those of you who have already maxed out your accounts!), please write to support@mendeley.com with a request for extra space and we’ll be happy to pass out some freebies. It will be a temporary upgrade but you won’t have to switch to a premium subscription later. Once the premium features are in place and if you choose not to upgrade, you won’t be able to add any further documents to your web account (if it is larger than 500 MB), but your data will still be accessible and safe.

Shared Collections

Taking a similar approach with shared collections – which are currently limited to ten people – we quickly found requests rolling in for collections of a much larger size, mainly for departments and labs. So, we will raise the number of people who can access a shared collection as part of a premium package and in turn make the limits flexible. Again, write to support@mendeley.com if you need more shared collection slots within your department, lab, or research group. Send us your username (e-mail address), the name of the collection, and the number of people you would like to collaborate with and we can expand your shared collection to make it a bit more sociable for the festive season.

(Image by CwThomas43)

School is back, so we thought it would be a good time to demonstrate how Mendeley can help professors, teachers, and alike to set up a “Recommended reading” list for their incoming students:

1) Create a new collection in Mendeley (left-side pane)
Don’t worry about the name you give the collection. If you want to rename the collection later just double click on it.

2) Select papers from your library (middle pane)

Make a selection of papers that you would like to include in your “Recommended reading” list and drag & drop them into the newly created collection. Note that you can have papers in multiple collections.

3) Make your newly created collection public (collections are private by default)
Click on your collection (left pane) to see the papers you’ve added to the list. You’ll notice there’s a “Edit Settings” button above the list (top-right of middle pane). Click it to change your Collection access settings from private to public. Feel free to add a short description of your collection’s content. Finally, press “Sync Library” and a link will be generated for your public collection.

4) View your public collection online and more
By clicking on the link that was created for your public collection you will be taken to your public collection web page at Mendeley Web where you’ll find the list of papers you included in your “Recommended reading” collection. So far so good.
You’ll notice on the left-hand side the title you gave your collection and your name after “Created by…”. There you also find the papers you added! (See one of my public collections here)

5) Sharing the goods
You find the tools you need to easily share your public collection on the left side of the collection’s web page. “Embed on other websites” and “Subscribe to RSS”. Let’s focus on the first one, since it’s the easiest one and will allow you to add your list to your class page with a simple copy & paste of provided code.
Click on the “Embed on other websites” option and a text field will show up with code you can use to display your “Recommended reading” collection on your class site.
Notice that there is a “Preview and Customize” button that will allow you to do exactly what they say, preview your collection list or customize the color and size of the frame that will display your list.

6) Copy, paste, stay up-to-date
Once you’ve picked the right color and size for your embedded reading list, you simply copy the provided line of code in the text field and paste it into the HTML of your class page. It’s that simple!
While you’re at it, keep in mind that this is the only change you’ll have to do on your page to keep the list up-to-date. If you want to add a new paper to your reading list, just open Mendeley, import the file and drag & drop it into the public collection you created for your class and sync your library. That’s it.

So there you go, in 6 simple steps you set up your “Recommended reading” list for your class and any updates or changes from one year to the next is easily maintained within Mendeley.

This example can be adapted to a number of other situations. For example for lists of published work on a personal or lab website, a list of recently read papers on a blog, just to name a few.

If you happen to run into any issues setting up your public collection for your class (or for anything else!), please feel free to contact us at support@mendeley.com.

This is just a quick reminder of our ‘Open Office’ event this coming Friday 18 Sept from 5pm onwards – in case you haven’t seen our previous blog post from last week: we’d like to invite London users to come in to our office and chat to us directly in order to share their general feedback and their suggestions as to what they’d like to see improved in Mendeley. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

If you’re interested in coming along, please email anne@mendeley.com.

We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Since we are getting closer to releasing version 1.0, we were discussing how to get even more detailed feedback from our users than we currently get through our support system.

Being able to chat with you guys face-to-face would obviously be best so we said: lets try it and do an ‘Open Office Feedback Session’. Meaning that everyone who is interested can drop in to our offices in Clerkenwell and talk to different members of the team and tell us face-to-face what you like to see improved or added to Mendeley. You can also bring your notebooks and show us directly what’s not working for you or which feature you would like to do differently.

Your feedback is very valuable to us so as a thank you we would serve drinks and snacks at our office which we could even have on our roof terrace if the weather will allow it, probably not – lets face it .

If you’re interested, please drop us an email at community@mendeley.com. We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Just a quick update: the Google Scholar lookup in Mendeley Desktop will now return improved document details. We’ll continue to work on improving this but if you have got any suggestions let us know and we’ll look into it.

As for other updates we are currently testing a portable Windows version of Mendeley Desktop which we’re hoping to release this week. We are also planning to finish all “behind the scenes” work for the next major release this week as well. More bug-fixing is needed though so the next version will probably be out around mid September.

As one of the many requested features from our feedback page, Mendeley Web now supports COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). COinS is an open and easy to use specification for publishing OpenURL bibliographic metadata in HTML. On web pages, embedded COinS can be read and processed by applications.

Also Mendeley’s Web Importer can now identify COinS embedded on other websites. This information can then be easily imported into your Mendeley research library. In addition, a COinS section is embedded in each of our article pages. This means that other bookmarklets can extract and process the information from Mendeley’s article pages.

Addendum: COinS are not only embedded in article pages but also in profile pages (own publications list) and in public collection pages.

This update introduces a lot of new features, including a PDF viewer, OpenOffice.org integration on Mac OSX and Linux, and many more. Interface issues, and a number of bugs are also addressed in this release, as well as improvements to the overall stability.

Just to give you a teaser – this is how it looks like to add notes to PDF documents:

• Built-in PDF viewer for viewing PDFs directly in Mendeley Desktop
• Support for annotating PDF files (syncing notes to and from Mendeley Web is planned for the next release)
• Many additional online lookups (CrossRef, PubMed, Google Scholar)
• Public document collections (reading lists) which can be embedded on other websites
• OpenOffice.org Writer plugin for Mac OSX & Linux
• Improved native user interface for Mac OSX
• Individual synchronization and privacy settings for each document collection
• Auto-save changes and undo functionality for quick document detail editing
• Flagging documents as favorites
• Marking a document as read, or unread
• Detecting duplicate documents when importing library files or PDFs
• Merging together document authors, tags, keywords or publications
• Editing document details, or tags for multiple documents simultaneously
• New “Trash” collection so you can restore deleted documents

• Changes to the toolbar and terminology in light of usability tests
• Better handling of documents with unconfirmed details
• More robust synchronization between Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web
• Search results are presented in a much easier to read format
• Searching for documents now searches the document details, as well the PDF text

• Detect and handle duplicate citation keys being used when exporting to BibTeX format
• Improved full-text indexing stability for search
• Allow documents to be renamed without the file organizer being enabled
• Clean up the formatting of exported citations
• Handle tags and keywords properly when exporting to BibTex format
• File organizer stability fixes
• Corrections to various citation styles
• Plus many more…

So no time to waste – visit our download page and give it a try, would be great to hear what you think! Also, thanks a lot for all the feedback from our leadusers who helped us polishing this new version.

Please note: As part of the upgrade process, if you have an online account already, Mendeley Desktop will need to perform a full sync when it next starts. This may take some time depending on the size of your library. It is a one-off sync that is required to ensure compatibility with an upgraded sync method.

If you have suggestions how to improve managing research papers with the Mendeley reference manager please let us know by visiting our feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask, please e-mail us at support@mendeley.com.

Roughly three and a half months after our announcement that we would plan to collaborate with CiteULike it’s even better news to announce that the first step is live – Mendeley users can now access their CiteULike data from within Mendeley. As we said in our previous blog post,

Your CiteULike account will show up as a “Document Group” in our Mendeley Desktop software, thus making your CiteULike metadata available to you in a desktop interface – from where you can manage them offline or insert citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word, for example.

Follow these steps to activate the integration of CiteULike with Mendeley:

• On your settings page, scroll to the bottom and enter your CiteULike username. Then click OK, and allow any pop-up blocking messages displayed by your browser — if any.
• You will be taken to an activation message on CiteULike’s site — confirm this action.
• This will take you to your Edit Profile page with a check-box displayed next to Enable Mendeley. You will find this at the bottom of the form, highlighted. Click Update Profile to save this.
• You will now see your CiteULike profile page. Don’t worry if you don’t see any confirmation — this is normal. The synchronization is now set up successfully.

You can enable, or disable, Mendeley synchronization by going to your Edit Profile page on CiteULike, and checking, or unchecking, the check-box labelled Enable Mendeley. If you don’t login to Mendeley once every 30 days, this sync will be disabled. You can re-enable it by re-checking this box.

This is obviously just a first step – together with the guys at CiteULike we are now working on a two-way synchronization. Our reference manager Mendeley Desktop now already offers a wide selection of import/export options (plus a Web Importer to grab citations off the web), and if you have any additional suggestions or comments, have your say on our feedback page.

Exciting news: Jason Hoyt, the founder of Ologeez (a semantic frontend for PubMed), is joining Mendeley! Jason holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University. At the moment, he is still based in Palo Alto, but once the visa issues are sorted out, Jason will be joining us here in London as our new Research Director. TechCrunch broke the story today with a headline that made our geek hearts beat faster, comparing us to a Klingon battle cruiser de-cloaking in London.

To get started, Jason wrote up his reasons for joining us, and how Mendeley can help change the Impact Factor. Over to him:

———————————

Changing the Journal Impact Factor

Right, so the first thing I had to ask myself was “Why on earth would I move from San Francisco, leaving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.

Well, I’m not going to answer by talking about how great the team is or how enthusiastic the founders are about improving research, which is certainly all true. Rather, let’s take a real-world example of how the “tech” behind Mendeley is already making a difference with how we view the impact factors of research.

(more…)

After putting the installers on our website last week we now set the auto-update for Windows, Mac and Linux as well. This update adds integration with OpenOffice.org on Windows, fixes several file organiser problems as well as various bugs reported by users. Work is under way on the next update which will include an integrated PDF viewer and many usability improvements to the user interface.

New Features:

• OpenOffice.org integration on Windows. To setup the OpenOffice.org plugin, restart Mendeley after installing the update and select Tools -> Install OpenOffice Plugin
  OpenOffice.org integration for Linux will be coming soon.

Improvements to Existing Features:

• Conversion between LaTeX commands for accents and equivalent unicode characters when importing from or exporting to Bibtex
• Add clickable link under URLs field to open current URL in a browser
• Add link in Tools menu to install the website importer in your browser which lets you easily import citations from popular websites such as Amazon, Google Scholar and PLoS

Bug Fixes

• Fixes for various problems when installing the Word plugin
• Abstract field was not filled in when clicking PubMed lookup button in metadata tab
• Fixed problem where file organiser did not always respect ‘sort into subfolders’ setting correctly
  on Windows
• Fixed problem where file organiser could get stuck in an infinite loop, repeatedly copying the same files
• Show more accurate progress information when organising files
• Fix author extraction sometimes stripping out lower-case name parts such as ‘van’, ‘der’ etc.
• Fixed problem on Windows where folder monitoring tried to re-import documents which had been explicitly removed from within Mendeley
• After sorting the library view, the wrong metadata was shown in the right-hand pane
• Improved RIS importer’s support for several non-standard fields
• Fixed crash if a problem occurred loading the data files which support the metadata extraction algorithms
• Export user’s notes to ‘annote’ rather than ‘note’ field in Bibtex to prevent the problem where the user’s reading notes could appear as part of the formatted citation in the rendered Latex document. Also import ‘comments’ field into the notes field in Mendeley.

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.