With the update of the Mendeley API last September, it was about time to give the Labfolder Mendeley Extension a polish as well.

Labfolder is an online tool where laboratory scientists can plan, document, and evaluate their experiments all in one place, allowing them to focus on the tasks they enjoy the most: making discoveries, developing new hypotheses and finding new applications. Just like Mendeley, Labfolder is available online, as well as on your Android or iOS devices.

Laboratory work and scientific literature go hand-in-hand, and so it was a no-brainer for us to integrate Mendeley as one of the first Labfolder extensions, allowing researchers to read, integrate and cite their scientific literature, whilst planning and conducting experiments. Additionally, laboratory notes and experiment details can also be uploaded to Mendeley directly, allowing researchers to manage and share experimental notes within the literature database. The API integration with Mendeley therefore closing the gap between laboratory and literature.

To see how the Mendeley integration works, watch this video:

When updating the integration of Mendeley in Labfolder, the new Mendeley API provided us with new functionality that permitted significant improvements:

Firstly, the API update allowed faster loading of the library. In the previous versions of the API, an identifier had to be retrieved for every document in the library. With this identifier, the metadata (author, title, year of publication etc.) would be retrieved for every single document. With the new API, it is possible to retrieve the entire library with one API call, allowing a faster access to all documents, even when the Mendeley library is quite large.

Additionally, the new API allows the display of file names of imported literature. When importing PDF files, including scientific literature from Mendeley into Labfolder, the previous version of the API did not support a handover of the name of the original file. With the new API, the file name of the original file is automatically imported as well, making the management of literature content within Labfolder a lot easier.

We are happy that, together with Mendeley, we can bring these improvements to help researchers with their work. Future improvements will, however, not only depend on technical innovations, but also from the input of you, the users! In order to help us to further improve, please do the Labfolder team at and tell us how you like the new Mendeley App – and what we can do to make it even better and your life’s even easier.