Month: February 2010

Mendeley v0.9.6.1 released

victorhenning15 Comments

We’re happy to announce several new features and important upgrades in this latest release. The most important ones are:

Bibliography generator plugin for Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac:

bibliography-generator

This has been one of the most frequently requested features by our Mac users – now it’s here! Therefore, bibliography creation is now supported in Word and OpenOffice on all three platforms (Win, Mac and Linux). It’s just the first iteration, so we’ll continue to work on it and add more functionality. Please let us know what you think at http://feedback.mendeley.com.

Collaborative PDF annotation using sticky notes and highlights:

annotationsync

This has been a repeated request by research groups, labs and departments using Mendeley. PDF sticky notes and highlights are now synced with Mendeley Web, meaning that in Shared Collections you can now see each of your colleagues’ annotations separately and color-coded. In addition, there’s a major upgrade to the PDF viewer – it will now render the displayed PDF document instantly, no more pre-caching!

XMP metadata now extracted from PDFs:

This is a behind-the-scenes upgrade – Mendeley will now read embedded XMP metadata from PDFs where available (Nature and Elsevier journals, among others, now provide this routinely), boosting the metadata extraction quality. Even where there is no embedded XMP metadata, the algorithms for detecting authors and titles have also been improved.

Because of necessary changes to our server architecture, older Mendeley Desktop versions are required to upgrade to this latest beta version to continue using Mendeley’s online features – we’ll try not to make a habit of doing this.

Here is the full list of improvements and bug fixes:

New features
  • PDF annotations are now synchronized with Mendeley Web. In shared collections multiple users can add notes or highlights to documents.
  • Added an importer for Ovid Reprints/Medlars format files.
  • PDF import will make use of embedded XMP metadata if it is present and appears to be accurate.
  • (Mac) First version of Mac Word plugin. Please note: Currently the Mac Word plugin supports Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac. Word 2004 and earlier are not yet supported.
Improvements to existing features
  • Added keyboard shortcuts for selecting, highlighting and adding notes.
  • Newly imported documents are highlighted after import.
  • The updater will now ask for the administrator password if necessary during update installation on Linux and Mac.
  • Added ‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ action to documents list right-click menu.
  • Improvements to accuracy of automated author and title extraction from PDFs.
  • Add the ability to drag-and-drop any file type into Mendeley Desktop. If the file type is not supported by one of the importers then a new document is created with the file attached.
  • Smoother scrolling in PDF viewer.
  • ‘Search by Title’ and DOI lookups will now retain the full names of authors if the lookup comes back with only initials if the initials and the full names agree.
Bug fixes
  • Fixed a recent problem with links between new documents and file attachments being lost for some users when syncing and a message warning that recently synced documents had been deleted on Mendeley Web.
  • Fixed crashes when exiting full-screen mode in PDF viewer.
  • Fixed red border around PDF content on PowerPC Macs.
  • Fixed local library data not being migrated correctly when changing email address in Mendeley Desktop.
  • Added additional verification of backups before restoring to web in the ‘Restore Backup’ feature.
  • File space usage shown in Preferences dialog did not update after syncing.
  • Incorrect progress messages were shown in the status bar when importing a PDF.
  • Fixed problem where starting a ‘Search by Title’ lookup for one document and then switching to another document before the results came back would apply the changes to the wrong document.
  • Fixed crash when performing DOI lookups in ‘Add New Document’ dialog.
  • The PDF viewer no longer creates temporary copies of opened PDF files on disk.
  • Fixed problem where only the first page of certain multi-page PDFs were shown in the viewer.
  • Fixed problem where search in a PDF viewer tab would not find matches on the last page of the PDF.
  • Fixed file organiser renaming failing on Windows for documents where the title, authors or publication name contained double quotes.
  • If uploading a file to Mendeley Web fails because the file is too large, the sync now continues uploading other attachments.
  • Fixed a problem which could cause Mendeley Desktop to loop continuously during sync.
  • Fixed PARSEFAILED error when syncing if certain characters appeared in imported documents.
  • Fixed long delay when opening the citation style browser.
  • Fixed long delay when opening the Tools -> Options menu on some systems.
  • Fixed incorrect documents being shown when searching for certain tags.
  • Fixed error about LinkToMendeleyVba.dll not being found on some Windows systems.
  • Fixed various crashes when syncing after removing shared collections on the web.
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 e-mail support@mendeley.com. Thanks!

Now it's your turn: Free-for-all Mendeley Webinars

Mendeley2 Comments

After the recent Webinars for CGIAR, we are happy to announce two free-for-all Webinars open to the general public. On Tuesday (February 23rd, 5:00 pm GMT) and Wednesday (February 24th, 9:30 pm GMT) Victor Henning, our director and co-founder and William Gunn, Community Liaison will demonstrate Mendeley’s collaborative features. There will be time for a Q&A session as well as a chance for you to share your experiences with Mendeley. To join, just pick one of the two webinars and pop over to the registration page to sign up.

Sorry, registration for this Webinar is already closed.

Date: Tuesday, February 23rd 2010
Time: 5:00 pm GMT
Presenter: William Gunn
Sorry, registration for this Webinar is already closed.

Date: Wednesday, February 24th 2010
Time: 9:30 am GMT
Presenter: Victor Henning

You’re a Mendeley power-user already? Then why not share this info with your friends and colleagues that are still looking for a free tool to manage their references and papers? They’ll thank you…

Mendeley Webinars take us around the globe

Mendeley4 Comments

Webinar ScreenshotLast week we hosted two Webinars for scientists and information professionals from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an international network of research institutions as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. CGIAR is aiming to achieve sustainable food security and reduce poverty in developing countries using scientific research and research-related activities in the fields of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, policy, and the environment. We are always pleased to find out about new areas of research, and to see that many people are already using Mendeley. Over at CGIAR’s ICT and Knowledge Management Department, Mendeley is widely considered to be an “intuitive, easy-to-use tool for online reference management” – Thanks, Meena!

So how global is global, then? Looking at the attendees of last week’s webinars: very, very global! Mendeley is being used in so many diverse locations – there were CGIAR researchers, librarians, and knowledge management specialists from Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, the UK and the USA. And it’s great to see that we can help to make research easier.

We are planning to offer more webinars very soon. If you or your organization is interested in a tailor-made web seminar, please let us know at community@mendeley.com.

Mendeley’s one-click web importer

Ricardo Vidal15 Comments

As a long-time Mendeley user, I can say that one of the features that I happen to really enjoy using is the one-click web importer. It was not available when I started using Mendeley to organize my references but when it was implemented, it made my work so much easier.

When starting work on a new project, there is normally an initial phase of your work-flow that consists of performing searches on websites for available literature on the desired topic.

You query the search sites with keywords, open each link that seems of interest, read the abstract and when available download the paper (PDF document). If you happen to be searching on many sites and downloading many papers, this can be a bit repetitive.

Repetitive work is normally tedious and time is usually short. So, what if you could easily download references and their respective PDF documents (when accessible) with a simple click of the mouse?

Mendeley’s one-click web importer enables you to add references (and their PDF documents) to your Mendeley reference library from within your favorite browser. All you need to do is add the web bookmarklet to your browser bar and you will be able to easily add documents to your library from a growing selection of websites like PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, CAT.INIST or PLoS, just to name a few.

Mendeley Web Importer supported sites

So I know what you are thinking: “Great, there’s a simple way to add documents to my Mendeley library while searching in my favorite browser. Show me how!”

OK, here is how…

First, you need to add the bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar. Do this by either dragging the link directly to the bookmark bar from the Mendeley web importer page or by going to Mendeley Desktop menu Tools > Install Web Importer. Once that’s done, you should be good to go.

Let’s give it a try by opening up Google Scholar and performing a search for your favorite keyword(s). Let’s say your keywords of interest are “Synthetic Biology”, the Google Scholar results should be something like so:

google-scholar-synthbio

Let us assume there are a few papers that you’d like to add to your library, so you click on the Mendeley web importer bookmarklet and a pop-up window opens. You are presented with a very similar list of references as those presented by Google Scholar with some extra options. Let me point a couple of these extras out (see image highlight):

Mendeley Web importer

Once you’re done importing the documents into your Mendeley library, they are stored in your Mendeley Web account. To be clear, the references are always stored in your library but the actual PDF files may not be imported if they are not openly accessible to Mendeley’s servers.

Side note: If the PDF documents you want to import to Mendeley are not openly accessible but you have access to them via your institutional network/proxy, there is a simple way of adding the document directly to Mendeley Desktop. Simply drag & drop the link to the PDF file and Mendeley Desktop will automatically download the file and auto-extract the document details. Let’s just call this our little secret work-around while it’s not yet fully possible via the web importer, OK?

Getting back to where we were, to have the newly imported documents made available on your computer, simply open Mendeley Desktop and click “Sync Library”.

There you go, without having to download papers one by one or opening multiple web pages, you can easily import documents into your Mendeley library using the one-click web importer.

As mentioned above, the list of supported sites keeps growing and if you would like to see another site added to the list, please feel free to contact us. The web importer also supports any sites using COinS.

Like I said before, the web importer is one of Mendeley’s features that I really enjoy using. How has your experience been using it?

Quick update: The Mendeley team is hard at work finishing up an upcoming feature for the Web Importer that will allow users to store local copies of webpages!