Month: October 2012

Liveblogging Open Science Summit

drgunn

I’m here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for Open Science Summit. This is my third year at the conference and it’s so great to see so many familiar faces. I’ll be talking about the developments in open access over the past few years and updating this page as the day progresses.

9:00 – The day starts off with Tyler Neylon recounting the story of the Cost of Knowledge petition. He’s drawing from a historical view to project into the future of open access.Read More »

Mendeley Desktop 1.7 Preview

Robert Knight22 Comments

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.7 is available. This release makes it easier to use custom and 3rd-party citation styles, includes an updated plugin for citing your Mendeley documents in Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac and includes a number of improvements to search.

 

Citation Styles

  • Easier sharing and installation of custom and 3rd-party styles. Go to View → Styles → More Styles → Get More Styles , paste a link to a style in the box and click ‘Download’. You can also drag and drop citation style (CSL) files into the styles dialog.
  • We have refreshed the available library of citation styles from the citationstyles.org repository. This adds many new styles.

Updated Mac Word 2011 Plugin

The Mac Word plugin has been updated for Word 2011 on Mac. The updated plugin has a more obvious UI for inserting citations and bibliographies. It is also much faster when refreshing medium to large bibliographies.  Word 2008 is still supported, but it will continue to use the earlier plugin which is accessible from the ‘Script’ menu in Word.

 

Search

Internal search has been overhauled in this release.  Many of the changes are internal to improve consistency, performance and stability.  There are a number of user-visible changes:

  • Search is now incremental across full text and metadata.
  • Search is faster and more stable when searching many large PDFs.
  • More consistent behavior between full text, document details and citation editor search.
  • Search now finds and shows matches for the search keywords in all metadata fields.
  • Improved handling of boolean queries (with AND, OR and ‘-‘ (NOT) terms).
  • Spelling corrections will now include suggestions from the full text as well as document details.

Other Improvements

  • The look and organization of the menus and toolbars have been streamlined on Windows and Linux.  The Mac version had a UI overhaul in the previous release, so we thought it was only fair to give a little love to the Windows and Linux versions.
  • Improvements to import of RIS files generated by RefMan
  • Updated tab-switching shortcuts that are more consistent with web browsers (Chrome, Firefox).
  • Improved performance for BibTeX sync and batch metadata edits.  We’ve also fixed a number of causes of UI ‘hiccups’ (sometimes referred to as lag) when using the app.
  • Import suggestions. Mendeley Desktop will notice when you tend to import PDFs from the same locations repeatedly and will offer to automatically import other articles from the same folder.

As always, we really appreciate help from early adopters helping us get the next release into shape.  Please download the preview and let us know if you find any issues.  You can report any issues on our support forum .  You can also suggest improvements our UserVoice forum.

For the full list of fixes and improvements, please see the release notes.