Tips & Tricks: How to Tailor Mendeley Newsfeed

March 30, 2017 Shruti Desai

We launched our Mendeley Newsfeed a year ago, but it hasn’t remained stagnant: we’re constantly working with researchers to create a more useful newsfeed.

Here are our top four tips on how to tailor newsfeed content:

URLs in a post can be expanded out to show the contents of the URL. This means followers will see a preview and image of the link contents.
Tag one of your followers in a post if you want a specific person to respond to a question or comment – they will be notified in the navigation bar and their name is clickable in the post.
Add a reference to a post, so you can refer to a specific article or share an article, and your followers can see the metadata and save to library without you needing to copy and paste it.
Add images to the post if you need to ask a question about a specific picture or share an image with your followers

We’re still making improvements, based on your feedback and needs, so watch this space!

Mendeley integrates with ORCID — uniquely identify your research

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 Shruti Desai1 Comment

ORCID ID

Searching for research is now easier than ever — but how do you know whose research you’re reading? Is the piece by John A. Smith, the Harvard researcher, or by John A. Smith, the internet blogger?

Mendeley is integrating with ORCID, the Open Research Contributor ID non-profit, to bring your unique research identification to your Mendeley profile.

Since it’s launch in 2012, ORCID has issued over 2.5 million unique identifiers to help researchers keep the record straight on what work is whose.

The integration is already live — you can create or connect your ORCID ID with your Mendeley profile today!

Verified integration

ORCID Auhorisation You’ll can link your existing ORCID account or create a new one, and you’ll have a choice whether to import your ORCID profile information into your Mendeley profile.

Future plans

For now, that’s a one-off import, but we are working with ORCID on how to keep your profiles in sync, so you don’t have to keep filling the same information in again and again.

News on your Mendeley Newsfeed

May 13, 2016 Shruti Desai

Screen Shot 2016-05-13 at 09.33.08

Two months ago we launched the new look and feel for Mendeley newsfeed. The response has been really positive. Thank you for all of the survey responses and feedback —85% of you said you liked the new newsfeed so that was great news for us! We’ve been amazed at the great ideas and thoughts for what you’d like to see on the newsfeed – please keep them coming!

We’ve been squirrelled away at Mendeley HQ working on new ways for you to use the new feed to find new content and further your research.

What’s new
You can now comment on news items in your feed, so if you see someone has a new publication or has moved institution, you can congratulate them or ask them a question. Comments can be edited or deleted if you make an error, and you’ll see other people’s commenting on items in your newsfeed. We’ve also built ‘likes’ so if you’re too busy in the lab to write a detailed comment, you can show your appreciation with a single click.

You might also have noticed the brand shiny new bell in the top navigation bar that will tell you when your news is liked or commented on, or if you’ve made a comment and someone replies.

Screen Shot 2016-05-13 at 09.30.47

There have also been some changes in the content that appears in your newsfeeds. We’ve built a people recommender to help you discover interesting people to connect with on Mendeley.

We’ve decided to add these features because we know that building connections and collaborating with other researchers is a crucial part of your work. We want to bring relevant discussions and interactions directly into your newsfeeds so that you’re always the first to know what is happening in your field!

So what’s next?

Well, we’re working on ways to make the newsfeed easier to use if you’re new to Mendeley and also to fill it with even more interesting content. The number one requested feature in the survey was “updates when a document in my library is cited, highlighted or read” so that’s something we’ve pushed up the backlog… watch this space!

What this does also mean is that we’ll be bidding farewell to the old dashboard so if you try to access it you’ll be redirected to the new newsfeed. We know that some of you might miss some group updates — so do we! — but we’ve made all of our changes to newsfeed using a new technology which is more flexible for the future. Although it doesn’t yet integrate with groups, will mean that we can add other exciting updates such as the ones requested in the survey. We are of course keeping group updates on the backlog and will be returning to them in the future.

Let us know what you think!

We will keep you informed of changes here in our blog, but we’d love to hear your feedback. Comment below, or take our (quick) survey on newsfeed — your answers will help shape the future of Newsfeed.

Mendeley Data is out of beta

April 28, 2016April 28, 2016 Josh1 Comment

Starting today, Mendeley Data is out of beta. We’re extremely happy with all the great datasets people have been submitting, and we now think that the product has reached the level of maturity where it has all the features people need to publish their research data online.

If you haven’t heard of Mendeley Data before, it’s a new product that allows anyone who has data from experiments to publish it online and get a DOI for it so that it is citable. We launched the beta version 6 months ago. We’ve released many new features over those months, in fact we’ve had 80 releases. So now we’re leaving beta, as a vote of confidence for Mendeley Data being stable, robust and fully featured. We think that Mendeley Data is now the best place to store research data online.

Some of the new things we’ve introduced over the last few months are an expanded category selection (we now have over 4,000 categories to choose from!), the ability to embargo a dataset so that the files are only available after a certain period of time, and some new fields such as “steps to reproduce” which allows you to explain how to re-create the dataset. We’ve got lots more in store, but we think now is the best time for you to try uploading your datasets.

We like to make sure that our service is available 24/7, so that you can use it day or night. Over the past three months, Mendeley Data has been online 99.993% of the time, or to put it another way, we have been down for just 9 minutes. Below is a graph showing our stats over the last three months.

We’ve got some exciting new features around the corner, the biggest of which is a new search functionality that will make it easier then ever to find datasets which you are interested in.

So what are you waiting for? Take a look at the datasets people have already published or create your own. We always appreciate feedback, so get in touch if there’s anything you want to say.

So why does my Mendeley Newsfeed look like this?

February 16, 2016 Shruti Desai

Welcome! Perhaps you’ve come to this post because you are a loyal follower of the Mendeley Blog. But more likely you are seeing this because it is showing in your new Mendeley Newsfeed. So what’s changed, besides the look, and why?

While research hasn’t changed in its essentials, how we keep track of what is happening in our fields is always evolving, and Mendeley is evolving with it. Your new Mendeley Newsfeed is a curated way to keep updated about your field and about the world of research.

Your Newsfeed is your window into your network, covering moments like:

When documents are added to one of your groups
Changes to the position or institution of people you follow
When someone you follow adds a new personal publication
Tailored article recommendations from Mendeley Suggest, based on last read and trending in your discipline
Updates to the Mendeley Blog
If someone you follow has followed someone else

You can now share new publication updates, documents added to a public group and your personalized document recommendations with your followers, so if you see something useful, you can draw other people’s attention to it.

This is just the first step we are taking in making sure Mendeley is showing you a variety of interesting content tailored to your interests and research network. We’re working behind the scenes to continue to enhance this experience, so please let us know what else is relevant to your research needs by completing the survey at the top of your newsfeed.

Check the app store: Your iOS upgrade is here

February 4, 2015January 5, 2016 Shruti Desai2 Comments

We’re happy to announce another update to Mendeley for iOS! This release helps bring our iOS app closer to your Mendeley Desktop experience, with metadata extraction. Additionally, it includes faster and more reliable sync, and several bug fixes, which takes advantage of the new Mendeley API, especially when syncing your iOS app for the first time.

The update is currently rolling out slowly on the app store, and should be available worldwide in the next few hours.

Previously, when PDFs were added from other apps, such as Safari or Mail, users would have to manually enter metadata. This new app helps you stay organised by attempting to import the correct metadata for the imported entry.

How to import documents into your Mendeley iOS library

So how do you go about importing documents into your Mendeley library from your web browser or Mail apps?

Use the Open option to open a PDF in Mendeley It’s also possible to add documents to your library directly from an iOS device once the PDF file has been opened in another app. This can be done by using the ‘Open in’ command from within the application you use to retrieve the PDF.

To add a PDF to Mendeley which has been opened from Mail (such a file sent as an email attachment), tap the open icon in the top right of your screen. You should see Mendeley listed.

To add a PDF you’ve accessed through Safari or Chrome, tap once on the PDF whilst viewing it. The ‘Open in’ option should be displayed at the top of the view and you can select Mendeley from the list of applications.

When opening a paper in Mendeley for the first time, the app will attempt to retrieve details of the paper and populate the reference automatically. This process will only take place once. Once the paper has been added to your library, it will be available on other devices or computers after syncing.

Once it’s completed importing, you’ll be able to make use of the Mendeley PDF viewer and start reading, highlighting and annotating.

As Mendeley needs an Internet connection to check a document’s details, you need to make sure you’re online when adding a document for the first time.

Want to learn more about the iOS app? Check out our handy guide “Getting started with Mendeley for iOS.”

Android

Mendeley_Android_mockup_v2 So this is an iOS update, but we know you would ask if we didn’t tell you! Official Android app development is going very well, and we expect to release in the first half of this year!

Let us know what you think

Comment below, or, if you are having issues, please send send your activity log (located in the Settings menu) as our developers monitor and respond to them, or email support@mendeley.com.

Mendeley Desktop 1.13 Released – Faster Sync & Catalog Import

January 26, 2015January 5, 2016 Robert Knight11 Comments

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.

Back to the Future with Mendeley

January 12, 2015January 5, 2016 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!

Mendeley for iOS7

April 14, 2014 stevedennis1 Comment

Today we’re very pleased to announce the latest update to Mendeley for iOS. This release brings a refined user interface, that is designed to feel at home on iOS7 and above, but still retains the familiarity and usability of the previous design. It’s currently rolling out slowly on the app store, but should be available worldwide in the next few hours.

What’s new

Refined user interface
Look up word definitions while reading PDFs
PDF Filenames output correctly when exporting to other apps
Fixed errors when importing PDFs from other apps
Fixed problems where annotations sometimes wouldn’t sync, or were lost when made off-line
Improved sync speed and general app stability

If you like the new version, please help us out and leave a rating or review on the app store. It helps us out immensely.

iOS Version Support

Unfortunately, this is the end of the road for our iOS5 users, so if you’re one of the few people on an iPad 1, we’re really sorry. You’ll be able to use the previous version of the app if you have them installed already, but it’s lifespan will end later this year when we retire the old APIs that it uses. If you can justify it, the iPad Air and iPad mini’s are worth the upgrade.

This version supports iOS6, but the number of users who have this installed has dropped significantly since iOS 7.1 was released (far quicker than we anticipated), so you can expect support for iOS6 to be phased out within the next 3-6 months, and definitely when iOS 8 is released.

What’s next?

We will continue working hard to bring you great updates, as quickly as we can manage. We can’t get too specific yet, but we are taking all your feedback seriously, and the app will continue to improve a lot over the course of this year.

We want to make it easier to import documents to your library with metadata lookups, web importer support and the ability to manually add references and folders. We also want to improve search and filtering options, improve annotation capabilities further, and improve the experience for users who are new to Mendeley.

Android

(Because you’d yell at us in the comments if we didn’t give an update) 😉

We’ve now hired a lead Android developer, and are still hiring additional developers for that team. Design has been ongoing for the last couple of months, and development will begin in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll be keeping an open dialog with the community about our progress. Please understand that we won’t be rushing out an app quickly. This would result in a poor quality experience and no one wants that. Based on our experience with iOS, we are expecting to deliver something towards the end of this year.

Mendeley Desktop 1.11 Released

March 11, 2014 Robert Knight1 Comment

Mendeley Desktop 1.11 has been released. The major new feature in this release are the new Contents and Enrichments tabs in the right-hand pane which provide an easier way to get an overview of a paper and dive into the relevant section of it. For an introduction to this, see our previous blog post. There are also a number of bug fixes for legal and working paper citations, handling of internal links in the PDF viewer and more.

One additional new feature in this release is a facility to opt-in to notifications of preview releases of Mendeley Desktop. New features and bug fixes for Mendeley first appear in our ‘development preview’ releases before we roll them out to a wider audience. Until now, you had to download preview releases manually from the downloads page. As of Mendeley Desktop 1.11, there is now an option to get notifications of new preview releases automatically from within the app and install them with a couple of clicks.

A note about Preview Releases

Please note that preview releases are not final and will have had less testing than our stable releases. If you’re not comfortable using beta software or you have an urgent deadline coming up, stick to the stable release.

Getting Preview Releases

Mendeley Desktop 1.11 now provides an option to opt-in to experimental preview releases of Mendeley. We’re rolling MD 1.11 out gradually to existing users, so if you’ve not got it yet, just go to Help -> Check for Updates.

To enable notifications of preview releases in 1.11 and later, go to Help -> Check for Updates -> Opt-in to Experimental Releases. Mendeley will then check for new preview releases whenever it is started and offer to install them. You will always have the option of whether or not to install a new preview release and you can opt-out of preview releases at any time via the Help -> Check for Updates menu.

Feedback

Please note that we can’t offer the same level of support for previews as we do for our stable releases, but we would like to hear about any bugs you encounter or thoughts on new features or changes via our support forum

More Tips and Updates

For more tips on using Mendeley, updates about releases and other news follow our Twitter accounts (@MendeleyTips, @MendeleySupport). If you’d like to vote on feature requests, please visit our uservoice forum.