There’s been a lot of work under-the-hood at Mendeley Web lately, so it makes me happy to finally be able to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on. Some of you may have already noticed the new notifications lightbulb in the upper right of the page when you’re logged into Mendeley. When there’s activity in your groups, the bulb will light up. You can also control how you get notifications by email in your Mendeley Web account settings.

In the Mendeley Web catalog, there have been some big changes. (more…)

Mendeley blog via DOM Visualizer

This week’s update could be the start of something big. At Mendeley, we know that as you read, annotate, share, and organize research documents, your knowledge and expertise is encoded in your collection. Decisions such as what groups a paper belongs in, what tags are meaningful for a paper, and whether or not you’ve read the paper through to the end are all important signals about how important a given paper is and how it’s related to others. Our mission at Mendeley is to help you leverage this latent information to more effectively organize, share, and discover research. Today, we’ve taken an important step in this process by using tags to group related documents and groups together, and we’ve also added a wiki-like page for each tag to describe the concept the tag represents and to link to related concepts. Intrigued? (more…)

Privacy settings can be difficult to understand. We really want to make sure that everyone can easily control what aspects of their Mendeley activity are visible and to whom. Towards that end, we have added more granular privacy settings where you can specify what parts of your profile should be visible to each of three categories: Everyone, My Contacts, Only Me. Shown are the settings you can now choose and below I’ve described how they work. (more…)

A useful way to keep your contacts up to date on what you’re doing online is to have services tweet out your activity. Now Mendeley will send tweets on your behalf if you add a publication to the “My Publications” folder or comment or like something in a public group newsfeed. You can activate this on your Account Settings page and pick and choose which activities you’d like to have tweeted on your behalf.

Another small but useful change is the addition of permalinks to activity feed items, making it easier to call attention to a specific item in the feed. You’ll find those attached to the date for each item. We’ve also made lots of under-the-hood fixes and improvements to the API. Please note that with this release, we’re also officially dropping support for IE6.

This week’s update to Mendeley Web has a some search enhancements that should make it a little easier to find things on Mendeley Web. The main addition is search for groups. Now that we have over 50,000 groups created by people sharing research on a topic with their colleagues, publishing curated lists, or just having a bit of fun, finding groups by invitation or through your contacts’ profiles isn’t quite enough. (more…)