Month: September 2009

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.4 released

Paul Foeckler31 Comments

After a couple of dev preview releases we now released a new official version of Mendeley Desktop. As highly requested by our users this release includes LaTeX support and Zotero integration just to name some of the improvements. See a complete list of changes below:

[UPDATE 02/10/2009]: Still working on updating the Linux repositories.

New Features:

  • Option to manually or automatically import documents from Zotero.
  • Automatic library backups and easier restoration of backups.
  • Added support for multi-word institutional author names such as groups or organisations.
  • Improved LaTeX integration. Add option to automatically create and update a set of Bibtex files from your library and added ‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ menu entry to copy ‘cite{BibtexKey}’ text to clipboard.

Improvements to Existing Features:

  • Improved performance and reduced memory usage when syncing large amounts of data from and to Mendeley Web.
  • Quicker startup after importing a large number of PDF documents.
  • Make several additional actions in the Document Details tab undo-able: “Search by Title”, “Details are Correct”, and edits with multiple documents selected.
  • Added more citation styles, as well as an interface to search for styles.
  • Added separate per-collection options to control whether files are uploaded to and downloaded from Mendeley Web.
  • Added a safe-guard against older versions of Mendeley Desktop being used with a more recent database.
  • Added a cache for speeding up the opening of PDFs within Mendeley Desktop.
  • Identified and fixed a number of issues related to scrolling PDFs.
  • Improved the stability when rotating a PDF, and viewing attached highlights or annotations.
  • Switching to fullscreen mode should now take you to the most recently viewed page in the PDF, instead of the first page.
  • Include the URL of a reference when using the Word/OpenOffice plugins to cite a webpage.
  • Enable manually marking a document as needing review.
  • Better handling of linebreaks when copying text from the PDF viewer into the abstract field.
  • Windows: Allow non-administrator users to install the Word plugin.
  • Reduce the time taken to check for availability of Neo/OpenOffice on Mac.
  • Display a warning when entering a citation key manually which is already in use.
  • Support for searching for keywords in specific fields using ‘fieldname:keyword’ syntax has been extended to all plain text fields.
  • Show progress information whilst exporting documents.
  • Introduced sanity checking to ensure that any sync that would delete large amounts of documents are intended.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed various crashes and other glitches in the PDF viewer.
  • Fixed various bugs in the file organiser which could cause file copying/renaming to fail or lose link between file and Mendeley document.
  • Remove documents from collection instead of moving them to trash when Delete key is pressed.
  • Windows: Fixed an issue with the Word plugin reporting “Combobox not found”.
  • Fix freeze when downloading large numbers of documents from Mendeley Web.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur during the sync process.
  • Fixed problem where fields that had been cleared in Document Details tab were not synced correctly with Mendeley Web.
  • Fixed crash when viewing some copy protected / DRMed PDFs.
  • Fixed DOI or ArXiv ID lookups failing in some cases with valid identifiers.
  • Added support for inserting citations as superscript, or subscript, where appropriate with the Word and OpenOffice plugin.
  • Fixed import of multiple URLs and non-numeric pages fields from RIS files.
  • Fixed export of line breaks in notes and abstract field to Bibtex format.
  • Correctly handle adding notes to multiple documents simultaneously.
  • Gracefully detect the version of OpenOffice available and handle plugin installation accordingly.
  • Fixed a number of issues with file renaming and the File Organizer.
  • Highlighting of search keywords in results did not work if search query was quoted or ended with a trailing space.
  • Fixed order of URLs in URLs field not being kept when closing and restarting program.
  • Some fields (Cast, Producers) were never saved to local database.
  • Fixed a character encoding bug when syncing collections.
  • Older (PowerPC-based) Macs: Fix a bug with the PDF viewer, so PDFs are now displayed in the correct colors.
  • Older (PowerPC-based) Macs: Fixed a bug that prevented exporting files to BibTex.

Feedback and Support

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

Catch Mendeley on its San Francisco Bay Area tour!

Jason Hoyt

As Research Director at Mendeley, I try to get out and talk about how we work, where we are heading, and any ideas you want to see come alive. This time I’m taking the show on the road via London, UK to the San Francisco Bay Area!

If you are an academic research lab or department, university librarian, or perform industry research and would like to chime in then lets meet!

I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area the weeks of October 12-16 and October 19-23. As the schedule will be somewhat tight, please contact me as soon as possible to arrange either a demo or conversation.

Easiest way is to schedule via my public calendar here, but you can also contact me directly (see below).

Point of contact:
Jason Hoyt, Ph.D.
JHcontact1

Update for "About us" and "Support"

Jan Reichelt

If you haven’t seen it yet, go and have a look – we’ve updated Mendeley.com! We’ve created two new sections in which we hope to give you a bit more information about us and to provide better support for the fast-growing Mendeley community.

About Us

Here you can learn more about Mendeley and all the magnificient people who are helping build it. And this doesn’t even include our Community Liaisons, interns, Lead Users, and all the other supporters we have world-wide.

We’ve also created a little showcase to display the awards we’ve won recently (yeah, reasonably proud of it… but we have to say that this is also due to all of your incredibly helpful user feedback which just makes Mendeley better with every release!). As you can also see in this section, many large universities have either recommended or linked to us, and we’ve already had many good reviews talking about Mendeley.

As you may also remember, we recently published some teaching materials. Hopefully our new “Spread the word” section is an even easier way for you to access these now. Let us know if this is helpful for you and how we can further improve this!

Support

In our new support section we help you to get started with Mendeley. You will also find our FAQ has been slightly redesigned. To get in touch with our support team (the “Stability Liberation Front” & “Mean to Bugs, Kind to Ponies” guys) to report a bug or to request a feature, visit our feedback forum. Watch out though, we are currently planning to set up a more extensive and detailed online manual for Mendeley. This manual will be wiki based too, so you can also become active and share your hints! Phew… ah, and the next release is also not far away…

Enjoy the new pages!

Share recommended readings using Mendeley’s Public Collections

Ricardo Vidal11 Comments

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.

Mendeley Desktop

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)

public_collection

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.

Reminder – Mendeley ‘Open Office’ this Friday!

Paul Foeckler

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!

Our "The Guardian" week

Jan Reichelt

Just some good news to finish off a week full of work: Today Vic Keegan, a technology journalist veteran from The Guardian, visited Mendeley’s headquarters in Clerkenwell and did an interview with Victor and me. For us, that capped a completely surprising “The Guardian” week – this is how things happened:

MiniBar follow-up

After seeing us present at MiniBar, Vic wrote some very nice words about Mendeley in his weekly technology column:

“Standing out among a slew of interesting five-minute pitches was mendeley.com, billed as an iTunes for scientific research papers, which again prompted the ultimate compliment – why didn’t someone think of that before? You can manage your own research papers from any computer and search others and link up with other researchers. No wonder that some of the world’s major universities have already signed up. The founders point out that public research papers reflect the science of two years ago, and if that gap could be cut down it could have a big impact on economic growth.”

MiniBar was a great event anyway, but such feedback is the icing on the cake!

Update – here is another Guardian article about Mendeley: “How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough”

Mendeley on #6 of top 100 tech media companies

Even more thrillingly, on the 7th of September Mendeley appeared on #6 in the list of the Top 100 Tech Media Companies, put together by The Guardian and Europe Unlimited. To celebrate, we took the whole team to a very nice Korean restaurant for dinner, and a pub for one, two, three… drinks afterwards (you can see some pictures in our photostream on Flickr). We’re going to present Mendeley at the TMI event on 1st October at 11am – so come by and say hi (if you want to drop by before, use our Open Office Friday next week)!

guardian

Interview with Vic Keegan / The Guardian

And then today, to finish off our “The Guardian” week, Vic did the following interview with us (listen here or below) – gosh, it sounds too strange to hear yourself talking! All in all a very intense but rewarding week – now I’m looking forward to the weekend!

http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf

Mendeley invites you to ‘Open Office Friday’

Paul Foeckler6 Comments

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.

Mendeley office

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!

By popular demand: teaching materials

Jan Reichelt2 Comments

Since many of you have asked for it (and because we thought it was a good idea anyway), we’ve increased our efforts in developing support and documentation materials for Mendeley. For example, some users (especially librarians) wanted to give a presentation about Mendeley at their institution, or asked for some written documentation about how to use Mendeley.

Currently, we are working on both a new support section and on some updated about pages. Today however, as a little appetizer, we proudly present our new and fresh teaching materials! You can use them to learn more about Mendeley’s features, or you can use them to spread the word about Mendeley by giving a presentation at your institution or department/lab by simply forwarding the materials to your colleagues, other researchers, and students.

  • Getting Started Guide: The Getting Started Guide shows you how to use Mendeley’s basic features. It is also bundled together with each Mendeley Desktop installation. You can download the document here (size: 1 MB).
  • Teaching Presentation: You can spread the word about Mendeley at your institution using our Teaching Presentation (feel free to adapt the presentation to your needs). It shows both Mendeley’s vision and how to use the features of Mendeley Desktop and Web. Get the Adobe PDF (size: 4 MB) or the Powerpoint PPT (size: 22 MB) file.
  • Mendeley Fact Sheet: For a quick overview of Mendeley’s features, have a look at our Fact Sheet. On just two pages, it describes what Mendeley is, and it’s easy to forward. You can download the Fact Sheet here (size: 2 MB).
  • Mendeley Poster: Finally, didn’t you dream of having a Mendeley poster next to your Albert Einstein one? Here it is, put it on your wall or the notice board of your university. Enjoy it here (A4, size: 0.5 MB) or download the larger one (A3, size: 1 MB).

Soon, you’ll also be able to download these teaching materials from our updated web pages. A big thank you to Aladin, one of our great Mendeley interns, and Ricardo, one of our community liaisons!