Category: progress update

Mendeley academic software progress updates. Infos about new features and new releases in Mendeley Desktop and Web.

Citation Style Refresh

Robert Knight5 Comments

We have updated the citation styles available in Mendeley Desktop from the main repository for CSL styles.  This adds 514 new citation styles and includes updates to many others.  You can browse and update styles from within Mendeley Desktop by going to View -> Citation Style -> More Styles.  Updated styles will have a blue ‘Update Available‘ label next to them. Click on the style and then click ‘Update Now‘ to install the updated citation style.

If you have developed new citation styles and you want to make them available to Mendeley users, please submit them to the CSL repository.

Mendeley Desktop 1.1 Preview

Robert Knight4 Comments

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.1 is available.  This release includes several performance improvements in the Microsoft Word plugins alongside a number of stability and usability enhancements.

You can download the preview from the right-hand side of the downloads page.

You can give us feedback on this release in the feedback forum, the comments in this post or via our support form.

Improvements
  • Improved the performance of inserting citations and refreshing documents using the Word plugins (these mostly benefit the Microsoft Word for Windows plugin, but there have also been improvements to the Mac Word plugin).
  • Pressing the ‘Delete’ key now removes the selected document from the current collection, instead of moving it to the trash. Pressing Shift+Delete moves the document to the trash and Ctrl+Shift+Delete removes it completely.
  • Folders in the left-hand pane are now collapsed on startup.
  • When a pair of documents are marked as not being duplicates in the ‘Check for Duplicates’ tool, that decision is remembered on the computer on which it was made.
Bug Fixes
  • Fixed a problem which could allow multiple copies of Mendeley to run at once.
  • Fixed Bibtex sync not updating the corresponding Bibtex files when documents are added to or removed from folders.
  • (Mac) Reduced watched folders resource usage and fixed crash when watching a folder containing a large number of sub-folders.
  • (Windows) Fixed Mendeley not being able to close Word automatically when needed on 64bit Windows.

Compatibility

  • There are no compatibility changes from the previous release.  In the event of problems with the 1.1 preview, you can revert back to 1.0.

Mendeley 1.0 is here!

drgunn16 Comments

Today, one of the world’s largest crowdsourced research libraries (that’s us) released version 1.0 of our desktop software, after almost 3 years in beta. This release comes just after two other significant milestones: the 1 millionth user of our application and the 100 millionth research document upload to our open research catalog. Key updates include duplicate detection, nested folders, and a refreshed Word plugin that stores a mini-library of cited publications inside Microsoft Word and OpenOffice documents. Get Mendeley 1.0 on the downloads page.Read More »

Mendeley Web Update – discipline pages, activity notifications, and more.

drgunn5 Comments

There’s been a lot of work under-the-hood at Mendeley Web lately, so it makes me happy to finally be able to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on. Some of you may have already noticed the new notifications lightbulb in the upper right of the page when you’re logged into Mendeley. When there’s activity in your groups, the bulb will light up. You can also control how you get notifications by email in your Mendeley Web account settings.

notifications

In the Mendeley Web catalog, there have been some big changes.Read More »

Mendeley Desktop 1.0 Preview Update

Robert Knight11 Comments

We are getting closer!  An updated version of the Mendeley Desktop 1.0 Preview (1.0-dev3) is available.  It can be downloaded from the bottom of the downloads page or via automatic update from Mendeley Desktop 1.0-dev2.

This update includes many bug fixes, including fixes for the de-duplication tool and the Mac Word plugin.  For the full run-down, please see the release notes.

Thank-you to all the eager users who have tried the previous preview and given us feedback.  This preview is expected to be very similar to the final release, so please let us know if you encounter any problems.

Mendeley Desktop 1.0 Development Preview Released

Robert Knight38 Comments

Update: The final version of Mendeley Desktop 1.0 is now available from the downloads page or via the in-client auto-update from Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 and later. Thank-you to everyone who helped test this release.

A preview of Mendeley Desktop 1.0 is available for testing on Windows, Mac and Linux.  The preview can be downloaded from the bottom of the Mendeley Desktop downloads page.  Before trying out this preview, please read the compatibility notes at the bottom of this post.

In this update, we have implemented some of the improvements most frequently requested by users in support emails and from our feedback forum.

We appreciate your feedback on this preview.  You can leave comments on this blog post or in our feedback forum.

Find and Merge Duplicate Documents

  • Mendeley Desktop now has a tool which you can use to tidy up your library and merge duplicate documents.  To find duplicates in your library, go to Tools -> Check for Duplicates.  Mendeley will then search through your library and present a list of duplicates that it finds, along with an indicator of how confident Mendeley is that a set of documents really are duplicates.

Sub-folders and Folders in groups

  • You can now organize your folders in a hierarchy.  To create a sub-folder, right click on a Folder and select ‘New Sub-Folder’.
  • Folders can now be used in groups.

PDF Viewer

  • The PDF viewer now remembers your last position and zoom/rotation settings when you close a tab and will restore them when re-opening a paper.
  • The notes list has been re-designed.  Notes now resize to fit their content and website addresses are now auto-converted to clickable links.
  • Viewing annotations across groups is now easier.  When viewing a PDF from one group, any notes or highlights added to the same paper in other groups you are currently a member of will also be shown.

File Organizer

  • The file organizer now archives files in a separate folder when the corresponding document is removed from Mendeley Desktop, reducing clutter in your file organizer folder.  There is also a Tidy Up tool in the file organizer preferences dialog to help you clean up existing organizer folders.
  • File organizer settings are now saved in your local database, so multiple users sharing the same login on a PC can have separate file organizer directories.

Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Plugins

  • The Microsoft Word plugin for Windows has a new look in Word 2007 and Word 2010, taking advantage of the extra space available in the ribbon.
  • Search in the citation editor is now incremental, rather than only updating when whole keywords are entered.
  • The Word and OpenOffice plugins now store a mini-library of cited publications inside your documents.  When updating a Word document, Mendeley Desktop can import citations from the Word document back into your Mendeley library if necessary (for example, if you cited a publication which has subsequently been removed from your library).
  • Various improvements have been made to citation formatting

Platform-Specific Improvements

  • Windows: A number of stability problems with the Microsoft Word plugin have been fixed.
  • Windows: The Mendeley Desktop installer and updater are now signed by Mendeley Ltd.
  • Mac: The window size no longer expands when many tabs are opened.
  • Mac: A number of Mac-specific crashes which occurred when importing or viewing certain PDFs have been fixed.
  • Linux: It is now easier to get Mendeley running on Fedora.  Mendeley also integrates better with the system look and feel.

Supported Platforms

Mendeley Desktop 1.0 requires Windows XP or newer on Windows, OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on an Intel Mac and Debian Lenny (or equivalent) and newer on Linux.  Macs running OS X 10.4 or PowerPC are no longer supported.

Backwards Compatibility

When Mendeley Desktop 1.0 is run, it will automatically backup your existing database and then upgrade it.  The backup will be saved to the archive directory in your Mendeley data folder.  If you wish to go back to an earlier version of Mendeley Desktop, you will need to either:

  • Copy your database from the archive directory into the main Mendeley data folder
  • Delete your local database and let Mendeley restore your data from the web

The file organizer settings are saved in your local database in Mendeley Desktop 1.0 and are not visible to earlier versions of Mendeley, which stored file organizer settings in a separate file or the registry on Windows.

Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Compatibility

Mendeley Desktop 1.0 can edit and update citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org documents that were originally created by earlier versions of Mendeley. However, earlier versions of Mendeley Desktop will not be able to update citations or bibliographies created with Mendeley Desktop 1.0.  This is a consequence of implementing the ‘travelling library’ feature and fixing a long-standing bug with the field types used for Mendeley’s citation and bibliography entries.

 

Mendeley iOS app gets an update

Ricardo Vidal19 Comments

Having access to your library on multiple platforms is a feature that we are quite proud to provide to our users. Windows, Mac and Linux users can easily organize their research libraries and keep these data accessible via the synchronization capabilities. This availability is not limited to computers but rather any device that can access a web browser. Furthermore, if you own an iOS device such as an iPad or iPhone, there is an app for that too! Read More »

Mendeley's research catalog is now wikified! Come help us organize the world's research.

drgunn18 Comments
Webpages as graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet

Mendeley blog via DOM Visualizer

This week’s update could be the start of something big. At Mendeley, we know that as you read, annotate, share, and organize research documents, your knowledge and expertise is encoded in your collection. Decisions such as what groups a paper belongs in, what tags are meaningful for a paper, and whether or not you’ve read the paper through to the end are all important signals about how important a given paper is and how it’s related to others. Our mission at Mendeley is to help you leverage this latent information to more effectively organize, share, and discover research. Today, we’ve taken an important step in this process by using tags to group related documents and groups together, and we’ve also added a wiki-like page for each tag to describe the concept the tag represents and to link to related concepts. Intrigued?Read More »

Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 Released

Robert Knight10 Comments

Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  For existing users, you can get it by starting (or restarting) Mendeley Desktop and accepting the update prompt.

Highlights of this release:

  • The new citation editor introduced for Word on Windows in the previous release is now also available for users of  OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word for Mac.  There is no longer a need to go back to Mendeley to select a publication to cite.  Instead you can just click Insert Citation (or press Ctrl + Cmd (⌘) + I on Mac) and type in keywords from the title, authors or publication of the work you wish to cite.

    • Open Office

    Mac

  • You can now export the sticky notes on a PDF as an annotation report in PDF format, with or without the content of the article itself.  When viewing a PDF in Mendeley, go to File -> Export PDF with Annotations.

  • Sharing PDFs with colleagues is now easier, whether they use Mendeley or not.  Select a document and click the ‘E-mail Documents’ button on the toolbar to send an article via email to one or more people.

In addition, there have been improvements to app startup time, citation formatting, RIS import, EndNote XML import/export and Linux desktop integration, plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

For more details, see the complete list of changes.

If you have a feature, change or bug fix that you particularly want to see soon, please visit our feedback forum and add your votes.

Ubuntu users: Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 was released for Ubuntu/Debian last week.  Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9.1 has been released today to fix crashes specific to the Ubuntu version that some users encountered when the file organizer was enabled.