Month: March 2012

How-to series: How to add supplementary data to references [part 6 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal9 Comments

Here we are, at the halfway point of our twelve-part how-to blog series. This one will be another quick look at something our members sometimes don’t realize. Your library can contain more than just references and PDFs!

There are nearly a dozen different ways to add references to your Mendeley library. Reference entries can have a file associated with them or not. In other words, your entries can be just document details or also contain the respective PDF, Word, PPT or other document format.

One thing that many don’t realize is that you can actually have multiple documents attached to a single reference entry. A good and recurring example of this is having a reference with attached PDF and supplementary data files. Useful, right? I know!

Here’s how you add multiple documents to a single references:

  1. Click on an entry in your library.
  2. Look at the right-hand panel which contains the document details
  3. Scroll down to where the attachment field is.
  4. Attach one or multiple documents to that entry. Done.

You will notice that the entry in your library will show a different icon from the entries with one or no attached documents.

Previous How-to series entries:

How-to series: How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!) [part 5 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal5 Comments

Have you ever had to quickly send a reference to someone by email or instant message (IM)? How about send a list of references at once? This can be quite a task if you have to open each PDF, copy the title, author, journal, year, etc. And format them in an email or IM reply.
For these cases, and anywhere you’d like to rapidly copy and paste one or multiple references, Mendeley Desktop has got you covered.
Here’s how:

  1. Open Mendeley Desktop.
  2. Find the folder or group of references you are interested.
  3. Select one or more entries using your mouse (you might need to use CTRL, SHIFT and/or CMD to select multiple entries)
  4. Use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+C (CMD+C for Mac) to copy. Alternatively you can use the menu “Edit > Copy”.
  5. In your email, IM, Google Docs or any other text editing field, paste the content you just copied. Do so by pressing CTRL+V (CMD+V for Mac) or the menu “Edit > Paste”.
  6. There you have it! Formatted references in a few quick steps. Select references, copy, and paste.

Quick note for those paying closer attention: you can also copy the references as LaTeX so the crafty LaTeX users can also enjoy the fun (CTRL+K or CMD+K for Mac)!
Another quick note: You can change the default formatting used in Mendeley Desktop by going to the menu “View > Citation Style”. There are quite a few styles to select from, so enjoy.

Stay tuned for the next entry in this twelve-part series of how-to posts. We’ll be going over supplementary data.

Previous How-to series entries:

How-to series: How to check for duplicate entries and merging [part 4 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal7 Comments

Here goes the fourth entry of our twelve-part how-to series. Let us take a look at how you to look for duplicate entries and merging whenever we do come across repeat entries.

As your reference library grows, it can happen that you add the same research article to your library more than once. Sometimes you’ll have a preprint and the final published example added. In general, Mendeley does its best to avoid having duplicate entries in your library and will tend to merge entries when they have the exact same metadata. However, every now and then some research articles make it in twice with minor differences between them that Mendeley Desktop can’t detect immediately. For these cases, you can go ahead and use the deduplication tool.

This tool, is quite self explanatory, however there are some details you may want to take note of: 1) it’s context specific. Meaning that it will only look for duplicates within the collection or folder you have currently selected; 2) It provides you with the option to select the document details you want to keep from each of the duplicates, thus allowing to maximize the completeness of your documents’ details;

So how do you use the deduplication tool? Here’s a quick run-down:

  1. In Mendeley Desktop, select the folder which you’d like to search for duplicates. It can be “All Documents”, a specific folder or even a sub-folder.
  2. Go to you Tools menu and select Deduplication tool.
  3. You will see a listing of the duplicates found (if any!). Select the one you’d like to examine and notice the checkboxes next to the document details in the right-hand panel.
  4. Select the details that you would like to keep from each of the documents.
  5. Click merge to stay with one only merged entry containing the complete document details in your library only once.
  6. Select the next duplicate set of references and repeat steps 3-5.

Here are a couple short videos exemplifying how this feature works. Nothing like an organized library of references, huh?

How to find duplicates:

How to merge duplicate entries:

Our next entry will show you how to quickly copy and paste formatted citations anywhere!

Previous How-to series entries:

How-to series: Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX [part 3 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal7 Comments

Keeping up with our twelve-part how-to series, this entry will provide you with a simple walk through of how to get Mendeley Desktop generating BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

The majority of us use word processors to write our essays, manuscripts and thesis. However, there are a crafty group of folks that like to use LaTeX, a document markup language and document preparation system. What most of us already know is that Mendeley comes with a built-in word plugin that works on most major word processors. What some might not know is that Mendeley can also generate BibTeX files for your reference collections/folders. Thus, making citing references a breeze. If you happen to use LaTeX to prepare your documents, here’s where you’ll find the options to create your BibTeX files on the fly:

  1. Go to the Mendeley Preferences menu
  2. Click on the BibTeX tab
  3. Select the options that fit your needs. One big BibTeX file, one per collection, etc.
  4. Click “Apply”.
  5. That’s it, your BibTeX files should be ready for you to reference in your LaTeX documentos.

BibTeX preferences in Mendeley Desktop
The next entry in our quick-read how-to series will show you a thing or two about keeping your library neatly organized without duplicate entries.

Previous How-to series entries:

How-to series: Drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download [part 2 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal3 Comments

Here’s our second instalment of our twelve part series of short how-to blog posts. We previously looked at how to merge author names in Mendeley Desktop. This time, we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to download a file directly into Mendeley by simply dragging and dropping a PDF link into the desktop application.

One of the easiest actions you can perform on any computer is the drag & drop. Select a file, drag it over a folder and that’s it. No copy, no paste, no command line, no nada. Drag and drop, virtual physical file manipulating joy.

To make things even easier to import files into Mendeley, you can simply drag and drop a (directly accessible) link for a PDF document in your browser directly into Mendeley Desktop and it will be downloaded and incorporated into your library. That’s right. Take a look at the following short video:


Although this is a great trick, it doesn’t necessarily work well with all browsers. However, I’ve tried it with Firefox and it’s worked quite well.

In our next quick how-to entry we’ll be looking at BibTeX in Mendeley Desktop.

Previous How-to series entries:

How-to series: How to merge author names [part 1 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal4 Comments

Features, many and useful features. That is what this blog post series is going to be about. If you’ve used Mendeley for a while, you’ll probably already have picked up on some of the following features and tips we’ll be showcasing over the next few weeks. However, I’m sure even some of these will be new to most of our readers, Mendeley veterans or newcomers.

Today’s how-to is a really nice and simple one: how to merge author names.

As you accumulate research papers and references in your library, you’ll find that sometimes the same author may be published with variations of the same name. P. Harvey, Pete Harvey, P. S. Harvey, etc. If this is in fact the same person, it becomes a bit of a mess if you want to filter your references by Author Name. In this case, you can use a simple technique to merge author names together to a single name of your choosing.
Here’s a quick step by step look at how this is accomplished:

  1. In the top left panel, select “All Documents”.
  2. Now, in the bottom left panel, scroll to the author name(s) you’d like to merge.
  3. Select the author name that you want to change and drag it onto the name that you want to keep.
  4. Click OK to accept the merge if that’s what you want.

Here’s a nice short video showing how this is done:

Our next entry in this twelve-part how-to series will show you how to easily drag and drop a PDF or PDF link into Mendeley Desktop for easy import. Stay tuned.

Papers aren't just for people

drgunn1 Comment



Image via klausonline

There should be copyright exemptions for text mining in research.

There is a fundamental shift happening now in how research is conducted and it is affecting all fields of academic endeavor. Some fields have already shifted and some are just beginning to, but the shift has a common cause, and that cause is the growing amount of research output. At a certain point, the amount of research output exceeds the ability for researchers to consume it all as it is published. In biological sciences, the shift has already begun, but the difficulties reach all the way to the (digital) humanities.

At Mendeley, we’re building tools to address this problem. Mendeley Suggest is designed to suggest relevant research to you, in effect showing you the results of searches you haven’t run yet. Searching the Mendeley catalog allows you to find papers in smarter ways than just keywords, by ranking the results according to how widely read the paper is and by showing you groups and other concepts related to the paper. At the end, though, there has to be a researcher reading the paper and using the knowledge to inform their research, and this just doesn’t scale. We need to be smarter about this. However useful these tools are, they only stem the flood, when what we should be doing is building boats. Read More »

Vote for Mendeley as best European startup in the London Web Summit

drgunn1 Comment

The London Web Summit is doing something a little different this year. Instead of having a panel of presumed experts judge sites and hand out awards, they’re opening up the process to everyone. Here’s your chance to tell the world that you value companies that are doing something truly useful for the world, as opposed to just another photo sharing or coupon pushing app. We’re now in the top 10 by votes, but we need a little more help. The research community may be small, but its voice is loud. Get yours heard.

 

 

Mendeley now available in Hojoki!

drgunn1 Comment


At Mendeley, we’re all about easy collaboration in the cloud, so of course we’re delighted that Hojoki has added us as an activity source. Hojoki lets you see all the activity from all your cloud apps in one shared stream, and share filtered subsets of those activities with colleagues & co-workers. It’s a great way to keep on top of what everyone is doing without having to separately watch Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote, Github, and your various Mendeley group activity feeds. It was actually silly fun watching the live feed, too. As people went about their daily work editing documents and scheduling appointments in folders and calendars I’m subscribed to, they showed up in in nearly real-time on my Hojoki feed.

To celebrate the addition of Mendeley (beta only for now), we’re doing a t-shirt giveaway of these awesome shirts featuring the Hojoki robot and Mendeley. Watch #mendeley for your chance to win one & if you haven’t tried Hojoki yet, give it a try.

Mendeley Desktop 1.5 Preview Available

Robert Knight22 Comments

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.5 is available.  Improvements in this release include:

  • Re-worked Windows Word plugin which adds support for 64bit Word 2010, improves document refresh performance, fixes several plugin installation problems and should help to improve stability.
  • The Undo/Redo buttons in Word 2010 can now be used to undo or redo changes made with the Mendeley plugin.
  • Several improvements to EndNote, RIS and BibTeX import/export
  • Compatibility with Ubuntu 12.04 (this also fixes problems under recent Fedora and OpenSuSE releases)
  • This preview release automatically syncs changes from Mendeley Desktop to Mendeley Web.  We may change this before the final release.

This is a preview release, so if you have a deadline coming up, please stick with the stable release.  Otherwise, we appreciate help in testing preview releases, especially the Word plugin changes in this update.

Download: Mendeley 1.5 Preview

Release Notes: Release notes for 1.5

Feedback:  If you have any problems with the preview, please report them in our support forum.  Please note which version you are using.

For developers, the code for the OpenOffice / LibreOffice plugin is now hosted on Github and this includes a set of Python APIs to use Mendeley’s Word processor integration.