Month: June 2018

Mendeley Advisor of the Month: June 2018

Rachel Brennesholtz

Mendeley advisor of the month: Waris Ali Khan, PhD Scholar in Business Management, Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

Waris Ali Khan comes from the small town of Kasur (Punjab, Pakistan). Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Business Management from Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia as a full time PhD Scholar. Waris is a founder of WarSha Intellectual Consultancy based in Malaysia (offering academic services to scholars). Moreover, he is extremely dependent on Mendeley as a research tool.

How did you get into your field and what is your research story?

Learning about business and commerce is one of my key targets. I studied commerce since college as I was very clear about my field of interest and gained a Bachelor of Commerce and then went on to gain an MBA. However, my PhD journey started in 2015. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship from the Universiti Malaysia Sabah.  Fortunately, due to one of my friend’s recommendations, I signed up for Mendeley. Since that day, I love to do my work/research using Mendeley as it keeps every single article of mine in a very well managed state. I have heard that people find research very difficult. Maybe they are right, but I think they have probably never used Mendeley.

Where do you do your research/work the best? What kind of environment suits you?

I like to do my job in a relaxed, creative environment with people who also have the same interest for Business.

How long have you been on Mendeley? 

Since, 2016. Luckily one of my friends from India recommended it. Thanks Mr. Ken.

What were you using prior to Mendeley and how does Mendeley influence your research?

The inbuilt MS Word References tool. Mendeley boosted my research by allowing me to annotate and quickly save papers to a place where I can easily retrieve them anytime and anywhere.

It’s also made a huge difference in terms of creation of my citation and bibliography as well – this used to be such a headache and wasted a lot of time but now no more headaches with Mendeley.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor and how are you involved with the program?

I decided to become an advisor because of my ever-increasing interest in the tool to the point of using it quite easily. I thought, why not show it to others? Perhaps they will benefit from the features as I do. From then, I asked Mendeley and was accepted. It made me very happy. Since I became a Mendeley Advisor, I have organized

number of workshops in Malaysia and Pakistan.

What researcher would you like to work with or meet, dead or alive?

I would love to meet the team who developed the SmartPLS software for data analysis as it’s very useful and important for PhD scholars specifically in social science.

 What book are you reading at the moment and why?

I read several books at once related to my PhD work, and many, many scientific papers as well. But I like books related to scientific research method. However, currently I am reading Research Methods for Business (Seventh Edition) by Uma Sekaran and Roger Bougie.

 What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned this week?

Recently, I was assisting my wife, who is also a PhD scholar at  Universiti Malaysia Sabah in chemical engineering. So, I learned how to do extraction of plants and their analysis using different instruments like HPLC. I was happy to learn about it as it is totally different from my field.

 What is the best part about working in research?

The best part is the opportunity to travel and contact people around the world that, no matter the language, religion, race, etc., share passion and enthusiasm! I am excited about my upcoming conference in Singapore. I hope I will be able to meet with other experienced researchers.

 And the worst/most challenging part about working in research?

The most challenging is to overcome the challenges of publication in scientific journals of high impact. Competition is very strong and there are other influences besides the scientific merit that one not should mention. But the joys are greater still.

 What is the one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?

I am quite sure if one uses Mendeley then he/she is going to handover his/her many headaches to Mendeley and, of course for Mendeley, it’s a Mickey Mouse job to deal with your research headaches. Mendeley is the key permitting to open the door to discover the existing research world, no matter the topic you are interested in.

Update on the missing PDF issue

Rachel Brennesholtz

Message from Laura Thomson, Head of Reference Management

Update 6 July 2018

Our team continues to work round the clock to fix the issues experienced by affected users however, this is a complex issue and it is taking us a little longer than we anticipated. We expect to have a solution deployed by the end of next week for most users, but it is likely it will take us into the week after (week starting 16 July) to fully implement the fix for all users.

Thank you for bearing with us, we appreciate your patience. We will keep you updated via this channel and our social media accounts. 

We know it’s been a difficult time for some users who experienced problems with missing PDFs and issues related to the recent Mendeley Desktop update. Most of us have been researchers ourselves, so we understand the concern that losing PDFs and annotations has caused. We apologize unreservedly.

As you might expect, we’ve been working round the clock to fix the issues experienced by affected users. Our team has now identified the reasons behind these issues and are working to resolve them.

If you had missing PDFs: most users should see these re-appearing in your library over the next few days. Please sync your library to check if your PDFs are restored. This process may take some time so do not worry if you do not see all your PDFs re-appear straight away. If by the end of next week (week of July 2nd) you still have missing PDFs, please contact Mendeley Support.

We recommend that you update to the latest version of the Mendeley software, which is version 1.19.1. You can start an update manually, go to Help and Check for Updates in the Mendeley Desktop.

If you have missing annotations: we can reassure you that these are not lost. To enable us to restore them for you, please upgrade to Mendeley Desktop 1.19.1 or later. Once you have upgraded, your annotations should be restored by the end of next week (week of July 2nd). If this issue is not resolved by then, please also contact Mendeley Support.

You may see your PDFs restored before your annotations reappear.

Finally, we know that we have more to do. We know that some of you are still experiencing crashes when working with certain PDFs and we will work to fix this in a later release. If you are experiencing other issues, please contact Mendeley Support.

Thank you for bearing with us over the past couple of weeks. We especially thank those researchers and Mendeley Advisors who gave us detailed information on the problems they experienced, which helped us to address them for the whole user community. We really appreciate your constant feedback and insights to help us improve Mendeley and serve you better.

We also appreciate that it’s taken us some time to get this information to you – this was because we wanted to be as certain as we could that the information we were providing was correct, and to do that, our developer team worked in detail with a group of individual researchers to make sure we had fully diagnosed and understood the problems they saw. We will keep providing updates through this channel and our social media accounts.

Meet the team: Elizabeth Chesters

mendeleyteam

elizabeth chesters

Name: Elizabeth Chesters

Job title: UX Specialist

Intro bio (background): 

I’m Elizabeth, a user experience designer at Mendeley! My background is in Computer Science, and I’m a developer turned designer after studying Human-Computer Interaction. I’ve worked as both a developer and designer in a range of companies, moving from the agency and start-up life to in-house. Originally, I’m from the North of England, Manchester and have been braving London for the last 3 years.

When did you join Mendeley?

I joined Mendeley on the 18th December, 2017. It was definitely an interesting point of the year to join with most people on holiday!

What do you love most about your job?

I love the constant challenges of being a designer. There are so many ways to solve even the smallest of problems, which could actually have a huge impact on our users’ lives. Being a part of Mendeley, I’m beginning to understand the impact my design has on people’s lives and careers and how important my work is. I may not be finding a cure for cancer or training the next generation of ballerinas, but it feels amazing to be supporting those out there who are doing amazing work.

What book are you currently reading?

At the moment I’m studying how to be more inclusive with my designs, so, I’m reading A Web For everyone by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. It’s fascinating how much it expands your thinking. For example, designing for someone only capable of using your product with one hand, whether that be because of a permanent loss of limb, they’ve broken their arm or they’re a parent holding a child. Anyone can be impaired at any moment!

What’s one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?

The feature I want people to know about is the Watched Folders feature. This is where can setup a folder on your computer to be ‘watched’, in your Mendeley settings. Mendeley then automatically syncs every document you put into the folder. This means you can download documents onto your machine and you don’t have to manually drag and drop everything into your Library.

How would you explain your job to a stranger on a bus?

I always explain my job as “making the web and technology less rubbish and more friendly for people.” I try to understand why people become frustrated because Alexa doesn’t understand them or discover how products should look at night when people are up late.

What’s the most exciting part of your job?

My users are probably the most exciting part of my job because of how varied they are. Working with new people every week keeps me on my toes. Every week we invite 8 users into the office, where we ask users to show us how they use Mendeley and gather feedback on our new products and designs. Each user has such unique research topics and intricate ways of using the same tool, which is fascinating to see.

What is your hidden talent?

I love learning languages and I can welcome and introduce myself in over 10 languages, including Arabic, British Sign Language, Sinhalese and Portuguese! My favourite part of coming into work in the morning is greeting each team member in their native language. People really appreciate the effort and it also helps break the ice when users come in for user research sessions.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned this week?

Every day I’m learning how screen readers work. Some screen readers actually pay attention to the visuals on the page. So, VoiceOver for Mac will group elements based on their visual style and if they look similar, like 5 words which look like 5 tags.

Support Update: PDFs Missing from Desktop and Web Library 

Shruti Desai

Message from Laura Thomson, Head of Reference Management

Where did my PDFs go?

As some of you may be aware, we are experiencing issues with missing PDFs on Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web Library. We know accessing your PDFs is a crucial part of your research and are sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.

We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible, so you can get back to your research, but we wanted to let you know what is happening and give you a workaround while we solve this issue.

What‘s going on and how do I fix this?

Some users are finding that all PDFs are missing from their library.

If you find your files missing from Mendeley Desktop and Web Library, the files present on your local machine can be restored by reactivating the sync. Click here for the latest information on how to do that. This will also restore the notes and annotations.

This solution may not work for all users. If it has not worked for you, please check if:

You see an error message that the PDF will not open. If so, then click here for more details.

Your PDFs are not syncing to the cloud. If this is the case, then click here for more details.

If the issue you are experiencing is not covered by the above, please contact Support so that we can help you resolve it.

When will this be fixed?

At this time we do not have an exact time when this will be permanently fixed. Please check this blog post, and our social media accounts for the latest updates.

Mendeley Twitter
Mendeley Support Twitter
Mendeley Facebook