community relations / News / progress update

Back to the Future with Mendeley

Shruti Desai5 Comments

We were so inspired by Josh Emerson’s Back to the Future look at internet history, we wanted to do one of our own!

We had quite a productive 2014, but it is nothing compared to what is in the works for 2015. Some of it we can reveal to you now — but stay tuned this year. Good things are happening, but here is a look at the past, present, and future of Mendeley 2015.

 

Mendeley Future — Android, iOS and Web Library

It’s 2015…the year we were due to get our hoverboards, according to the movie “Back to the Future.” We’re trying to convince the developers to make it happen by the next Mendeley Hack Day, but until that does, the new future of research means bringing it on the go with our upgraded iOS app and upcoming Android app. Our iOS upgrade improves syncing speed across your Mendeley platforms, using our fresh API. We expect the update to hit the iTunes store later this month — we’ll be sure to let you know when it does.
And our Android app is expected within the first half of this year! That’s right, before the summer sun (or winter sun for our southern hemisphere users) you’ll be able to take your Mendeley library on-the-go with your Android smartphones and tablets.

Anxious for a sneak preview? Product Manager Steve Dennis walks us through the latest iteration on this preview video.

 

We also have a sneak preview of the fresh web library, your Mendeley library accessed through a browser. The new web library, expected within the next month, is redesigned from the ground up, with a much improved user interface. Highlights include the ability to upload PDFs with automatic metadata extraction.


This is just a brief sneak peek, there are many other new things coming soon! And don’t worry about missing the news — we’ll sound the trumpets when they all get officially released!

Mendeley Present — Desktop Update

When you opened your Mendeley Desktop after your New Years’ break (and of course you took a proper break rather than work through the holidays, right?), you may have noticed an update to your Mendeley Desktop (version 1.13-dev7 for the technically-minded).

So what’s new in your Mendeley Desktop? We:

  • Fixed empty titles on document deduplication.
  • Fixed issue that would prevent the user from deleting a document note created by another user in a shared group.
  • Fixed issue that could crash the application if the owner of a shared group had deleted his account
  • Fixed issue that would prevent the user from restoring the backup.

For more information, and to find out what to do if you’ve encountered any issues with the new release, read the release notes on our website.

All of these changes feed into our bigger goal to give our users the ability for users to easily access and sync their Mendeley
library across a range of devices.

All of our updates take advantage our fresh API, which is open for everyone to use for building tools to make researchers’ lives easier.

Mendeley Past — A look back to where we started

Do you follow us on Twitter or Facebook? To close out 2014, we took a look back to the Mendeley past.

Check out what your Mendeley Desktop looked like in 2009:

And learn what Mendeley was called before it was Mendeley. Hint: It has B-movie overtones.

 

What do you remember best about Mendeley past? What are you hoping for most in the Mendeley future? Share your thoughts in the comments!

5 thoughts on “Back to the Future with Mendeley”

    • We’re currently investigating options to bring citation functionality to other Word processing apps. I don’t know if we’ll be able to achieve integration with Pages that is as smooth as Word – its support for third-party integration is unfortunately pretty limited, but we’ll see what we can do.

  3. I really appreciate your work and I am a happy Mendeley user on a per diem basis.
    I am also very excited for what you have planned in 2015 especially considering the Android-App. Thank you very much for all your effort, Mendeley-Team.
    I would looking forward to seeing the following features being implemented though:
    — The possibility to tag entries as part of a series like so: Kölner Germanistische Studien; Band 40
    — Italics in titles (I am aware of the workaround with HTML-tags)
    — Ability to store added PDF-files on dropbox while using Mendeley across multiple platforms
    — Settings for quotation marks. Change “” in title to “”, «», »« or „“ in Microsoft Word

  4. Was it in 2009? You had a nice little statistics feature on the Mendeley website. The statistics showed the Top 5 of journals and authors (and something) you had the most documents in your library and how that compared to the peers of your research area.
    I assume you won’t bring back that feature, right?

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