progress update

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.

22 thoughts on “Mendeley Desktop 1.5 Preview Available”

  1. Will you be adding the ability to add page numbers to citations in Word in the next version? I think many people are waiting for it. A way similar to how Zotero handles it would be great 🙂

  6. Ah.. the journal abbreviations are no longer working with the preview version.

  7. Why does this new version still not have support for journal abbreviations when building bibliographies? The “hack” that is discussed on your feedback boards does not work on my mac. Please bring this functionality soon? Mendeley is of limited value without this as it does not actually allow use of the citation styles of most biological journals. Please help! I loved Mendeley until I found out it lacked this basic functionality!

  8. Auto-sync, awesome 🙂
    Thanks a lot guys!!!

    PS: how many times did I forget to hit the sync button before leaving the office and thus, once at home, did not have any of the documents and annotations I had added during the day. I hope this is the end of this frustration 🙂

  9. Good lord when is the BibTeX output going to be fixed? Double braces around titles? Journal name insanity? Tons of us brought this up in the pre-1.0 days. The fact that I have to write scripts to rip through the BibTeX output to make it reasonable (not to mention Journal Name Normalizing, etc….) is really sad. I know there are probably all sorts of different priorities, but man, you’d think that whoever is assigned the BibTeX processing stuff would have maybe had a look by now…

  10. The word plugin (in office 2007 at least) is buggy. It now lists citation styles in a random (rather than alphabetical order), and I need to cite a paper first before I am allowed to select the citation style I want. These are of course minor points, but ones I thought you might like to know.

    A more major point is that when shifting from one folder to another in Mendeley, it will shuffle the order of the articles (my default is alphabetical by first author’s last name). This is particularly annoying for when I am searching through my 1500 documents for a paper by a particular first author. When I shift from one folder to another, I constantly have to resort by author to get it to list alphabetically again.

    Something like what they have in Windows (and lots of other software for that matter) would be VERY helpful and a time-saving device. Specifically, in the highlighted folder, start typing the first few letters and it will immediately jump to the first matching item according to your sort criterion (e.g., last name, paper title, journal title etc.). This would be much faster than manually scrolling down until I find what I need. This function seems already to be in place if “Title” is the selected sort criterion, but it would be helpful if it were available for first author last name as researchers generally remember and sort papers by who wrote it rather than the first word in their titles.

  11. Please add the journal abbreviations in bibliographies. The program is otherwise of extremely limited value…

  12. The word plugin (in office 2007 at least) is buggy. It now lists citation styles in a random (rather than alphabetical order), and I need to cite a paper first before I am allowed to select the citation style I want. These are of course minor points, but ones I thought you might like to know.

  14. I have just installed this 1.5 Preview version since my computer is using 64bit windows7 and Office2010. However I can’t find the “References” tab on the right side of the Mendeley Desktop window. There are only “Details” and “Notes” tabs there. Could you tell me how to make it appear? Or is it a problem with this new version?

  17. Why did you kill the abbreviation hack? I guess most biologists who ‘really’ uses Mendeley have been using it. I down graded to version 1.3, but I got no more access to the WEB. At least, you should keep older version alive, when many people are satisfied with it. Please do not version down!

  18. Without support for Journal Abbreviations, this application is insignificant as a reference manager.

  19. Loving all the progress being made with Mendeley but unfortunately “minor” things like not being able to abbreviate journal names really detract from its functionality. Please bring back the “abbreviation hack”.

  21. I followed the steps (make a journalAbbreviations folder with a default.txt file), but I cannot seem to get journal abbreviations in Mendeley (Export to Bibtex on Mac) working. Honestly, nothing happened after making the folder, even when I switched to ‘Vancouver’. Since I really had to hand something in, I decided to edit my bibtex file by hand, no fun at all. Is there any way to do this?

  22. I also followed the steps and could not get journal abbreviations to work with windows 7 and the latest version of word. Please fix this!

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