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:
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:
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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!
Mendeley Blog 
I would like to see the same integration in Apple Pages, which is getting more and more adopted by students.
Anyways, nice update! I love Mendeley more and more.
Manu
2 points
1. You should be a link to where to find the Mac Word Plugin and use it. I am trying to find this information on the web site for 20 min. 2. This last version crashed often on mac when I tried to synchronize (one over 2 attempts).
Thanks for this useful tool
Hi Franck, thanks for your feedback. We’ll create a FAQ entry about the Mac Word Plugin – the option to install it is under the Tools menu in Mendeley Desktop. Would be great if you could send additional information (OS you’re using and log file – see http://www.mendeley.com/faq/#recover-from-syncing-problems for where to find the verbose log file) to support@mendeley.com in case the software keeps crashing for you.
I am experiencing problems with Mendel in Ubuntu 9.10. It opens fine, but when I try to change folder Mendely crash and give a message of segmentation fault. I practically cannot do anything. Even moving across references in the originally open folder produce a crash.
Now I have the Ubuntu Karmic build installed (from repository), but I also tried the generic Linux build, with the same problem.
How can I delete the config file? And the local database? Since I have it sync i can recover it from the net, but I cannot find the place for the config file and local database…
Any suggestion to solve this problem?
I wrote to support, but I got no answer…
Mario
When can we expect an update on CSL?
I can write csl files, but nothing works the way It does in Zotero.
Terms and labels don’t often don’t work, a majority of document types don’t respond, many variables return nothing, and there is no documentation.
is it possible to see the annotations and sticky notes with normal PDF readers? some while ago I tried mendeley and it was not possible. actually that was (and is) the main reason why i am not using mendeley. i do not want to annotate all my pdfs and if i decide to change the software i cannot access my annotations any more.
In the “File” menu of Mendeley Desktop you will find the option “Export PDF with annotations” which *should* export both highlighting and sticky notes. However, we’ve discovered that sticky notes don’t get exported – which is a bug. We’ll fix this for the next release.
Hi Franck, I recentely discovered this software and as a PhD student I must say it is very useful! However, I have a little issue: with the Linux version I am unable to open ANY link to webpages. My default browser (chromium) just doesn’t open. Is there a way to set Mendeley to open a specific browser? Thank you very much.
Well, I just got the wrong name 🙂
It should be possible to download the PDF file from the page of each paper
e.g. Although PDFs are listed in the profile page
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/panayiotis-zaphiris/
they are not listed in the individual paper’s page
http://www.mendeley.com/c/2322440501/610/pfeil-2010-applying-qualitative-content-analysis-to-study-online-support-communities/
I am not able to connect Mendeley with Word 2007/ Window XP. I follow all the instructions you give, also reinstall the program and restard the computer several times and it does not work.
I notice that at Word Options/ Add-Ins the Mendeley version at
Word/STARTUP/Mendeley 0.4.61.dot
I am not able to change it, but also I don’t known if this may correct the problem.
Please help
Thanks for all, specially for this super useful tool!
Hey there,
again a nice release towards the 1.0 ; )
But… (You saw this one coming, eh?) When I just wanted to sync my Mendeley Desktop on my Ubuntu64 machine to get the latest articles added on my office WinXP machine (of course both are vers.0.9.6.1), some but not alle files were missing. The entries are all present though… After synching both progs about 23 times and seeing the files not being present on the mendeley web account (so its an up- not a downloadproblem…), I realized sth diffferent, maybe not connected? My quota says – on both hosts – that I use 17MB. I was somewhere at maybe 150-200MB when I looked last time and there are no – or at least no significant number I realized – files lost on the web account. Strange… But maybe this is uncorrelated and due to the soon to be introduced gigantic – and of course free – quotas? ; )
Cheers
Sebastian
I spend a lot of time adding sticky notes for my PDF documents. However, I am not able to print these comments or even the PDF it self from the library.
It is one of the very important features for me to be able to read my notes and comments offline from a printed document.
Would it be possible to add this feature to Mendeley. Even the direct printing of the PDFs open in the Mendeley is not possible at the moment but I am sure would be very useful for many people.
This was one of greatest updates. I think Mendeley is a good choice for many students. This update has some great features but still with few bugs and glitches.
Any news on CSL ? I realy use to combine the power of Mendelay and Zotero ? I there any roadmap for Mendely for us to se with planed futctionalites. I dont wanna sound like request – thanks for youre work and keep on !