progress update / Tips&Tricks

The Mendeley Web Importer has just been given a facelift

stevedennis12 Comments

As you may know, the Mendeley Web Importer lets you effortlessly import articles from the web into your Mendeley library. It is a great tool for saving your research while you browse the many supported sites for later reading and citing.

web-importerWe’re happy to announce that a new version of the Web Importer has just been released with a much-improved user interface.  Additionally, as the Web Importer does not display in a popup window any more, you no longer have to worry about fiddling with your browser’s popup blocker settings.

If you already use the Web Importer, you will see the new updated interface right away (unless you have a really old version, in which case, you will be prompted to reinstall the Web Importer). New users can follow the simple installation instructions, and see how it really makes importing articles a breeze.

You can also save multiple articles at once from supported search-results pages such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct, and more.

multiple-results

This is going to be the first of the many improvements we will be bringing to the Web Importer over the next few months. Some other features we’ll be looking at will include improved full-text download support, browser extensions, mobile support, and wider support for different sites in general. As always, we really want to hear your feedback, so leave a comment below!

12 thoughts on “The Mendeley Web Importer has just been given a facelift”

  1. Quick question: after you use the new importer, how do you close the floating window so that you can go back to reading the article?

  3. Ah yes, sometimes it appears, but sometimes not. Perhaps a flaky IE issue. I’ll try contacting support.

  4. The update is great – but it does not work on IE 8, which I have at work. Many of my colleagues in the NHS will be stuck with IE7.

  5. It seems that the importer is using cross site scripting, which is something that protective plugins such as NoScript are blocking. And it is not easy to define exceptions as your importer can be applied to many sites…..

  6. Thanks for the update, however, a major annoyance remains: when importing from google scholar long journal names are truncated. This is extremely frustrating, as the bibtex file is available via a link for each hit. Please fix this long-standing issue, which has been known for years.

  7. 1) Did you discontinue the Chrome extension when you published this new web importer?
    2) This new web importer does not work for me on Google Scholar results, neither with Chrome nor Firefox.

  8. Is this web importer meant to download the pdf as well if possible? Tried with PLoS and it did not work.

  9. We need to inject Javascript into the page in order to capture the current contents, therefore it is not cross-site scripting in the malicious sense. There are some blockers which will stop that, but that will always be the case with third party tools.

    We do not develop the Chrome Extension, so unfortunately we are not able to look into this problem.

    If you have any problems with this web importer, please contact the Mendeley Support Team at support.mendeley.com (this article might prove useful: http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/articles/1169236-cannot-log-in-to-use-web-importer ).

  10. Is there any way to configure the importer so that it doesn’t hang around after you click the bookmarklet? I understand that there are certain complex situations where you want it to stay there, but I often just want to click and nothing else. It is no longer a “one-click” bookmarklet.

  11. I still find I have to manually edit sources I’ve imported. I typically use google scholar and usually have to into Mendeley to add in first names for authors as well as volume, issue, and pages on journal articles. It would be great if the importer could pick these up.

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