Mendeley Desktop 1.13 is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux. This update has largely been about under-the-hood work on sync functionality to make it faster and enable you to access it across a wider range of platforms. Coming soon, you’ll be able to access your Mendeley library from our upcoming new web and Android apps, plus a revamped iOS app.
We’ve also been working on improving the PDF import functionality. The new release of Mendeley will automatically update imported documents with details of the matching entry in our catalog, enabling you to cite the paper without further corrections more often.
New and improved in this release
Faster Sync
In addition to enabling new first and third-party apps for accessing your Mendeley library, the new sync infrastructure allows faster and more data-efficient sync of large libraries. Syncing a typical library is now 2-3x faster. If your library is large (many thousands of entries) or you are on a slower connection, the benefits will be much greater.
Catalog Import
Mendeley Desktop matches papers you import to entries in our catalog which combines data from users and other sources, providing readership statistics, popular tags and other information for papers. In Mendeley Desktop 1.13 we’ve added an Update Details option to import data from the catalog into your Mendeley library. This should save you time when you come to cite the paper. To use it, just select a group of entries in your library, right click and select Update Details:
Mendeley will then refresh the details with the latest version of the entry from our catalog:
Hit the ‘View research catalog entry for this paper’ link to see more about the paper on Mendeley. Where the author is on Mendeley themselves and has uploaded the paper to their My Publications folder, you can also connect with them:
Early access to new Mendeley features
If you’d like to get early access to new Mendeley releases, you can opt-in to our preview releases via Help -> Check for Updates -> Opt-in to Experimental Releases in the app. The current preview release is a bug-fix update which addresses several of the top causes of crashes in the app.
New for Developers
This release of Mendeley Desktop is built entirely upon our new API which is also available for public use. Unlike our previous public API, the new platform provides access to all of the data which is displayed in Mendeley Desktop including documents, folders, annotations, file attachments and metadata lookup. If you want to build your own tools that use Mendeley’s data, check out our developer portal.
Mendeley Blog 
“In addition to enabling new first and third-party apps for accessing your Mendeley library”
Does this mean that we will see an official cloud drive integration for Mendeley? (i.e. Dropbox etc)
Hi bjorn – We have ideas for ways that we want to improve dealing with files in Mendeley but nothing concrete that we can share about integration with Dropbox etc. at the moment. We are very aware that a significant proportion of our users use one or more cloud drive services though.
I noticed that a significant number of individuals were inquiring about more annotation options for Mendeley (handwritten notes for instance). I know that there are a lot of apps out there doing just that (GoodNotes and iAnnotate to name a couple). Have you guys thought about integrating Mendeley with one of these? Something along the lines of exporting the Mendeley PDF to one of these apps, annotate it and then the app will automatically sync the annotations with Mendeley. I guess it will be much easier to go this route as opposed to build the whole annotation engine in Mendeley. I thought it might be worth sharing the idea.
I really like Mendeley and the job you’re all doing to improve it! There is one “but” – in the newest version suddenly many more fields appear in the “Details” tab – I think it’s unnecessary. Basically, now the options to choose what is displayed for each entry type are useless – all that has any content (even some automatically generated unimportant meta-information) will be displayed. Could you disable this feature?
Hi friends
my mendley keeps crashing, please help
Might I suggest fixing the subscript/superscript/greek letters issue first before adding things that might be useful from time to time but are hardly essential?
I find the “Update Details” option very useful to get all the necessary metadata for a particular PDF. I have done it for all the existing PDFs in my library. I am wondering if this is done automatically for new PDFs that I add to my Library? Or I have to do it manually every time I add a new PDF?
Is it now possible to cite articles “in press”, “submitted” “accepted” etc?
After using Mendeley for sometime I am giving it up total together with all my team. That is it Mendeley! I am back to Zotero with no looking back.
I have been waiting for very long for the Mendeley team to reply the long and repeatedly requested version of no Sync version of Mendeley Desktop. Unfortunately the development team does not seem to respect the need of its user community. Some people may need a Mendeley that sync their data but many other serious researchers who care about their privacy and require a solid and well-maintained database without the intervention of Mendeley database handiling etc do not wish to have it.
It is time for Mendeley to listen!
Any news on adding the ability to use italics in reference titles? I know this is possible with the html tags but this is a huge pain.
This is the number one reason I can’t use Mendeley. If you add this feature you will get a huge number of new users! Eg. any biologist who wants to have scientific names italicised in article titles.
Please, please consider making this a higher priority, it is a known limitation for years now!
@Ben, it’s on our roadmap for this year. We’ve been unable to due to technical limitations that we’re still untangling. We’re getting there slowly though.