Tag: android

New Android Kit Released for Mendeley API

Alice Bonasio3 Comments

Android SDK

We have been very busy at Mendeley looking at how to improve the Developer Experience for the community that builds cool stuff on the Mendeley API.

For those who don’t know, API stands for Application Programming Interface and it’s what allows your product to talk to other products, opening up your data and functionality to outside developers.

Altmetric

So far we have well over 100 active clients developing with the Mendeley API, which is not too shabby. These include Android and Kindle clients like Scholarley and KinSync, Altmetric, which tracks what people are saying about papers online, and Labfolder, an app that helps researchers organise their protocols and data.

Labfolder

We want developers to make A LOT more apps for Mendeley though, so we listened to feedback and put together a new and much improved API and sleek Developer Portal, where we’re now collating a whole bunch of tools and resources to support our developer community.

Dev Portal

We also have a growing API Team at Mendeley including Joyce Stack, who’s dedicated to Developer Outreach. If you’re wondering what exactly that is, here’s some first-hand insight on what her job is like. Just don’t call her an Evangelist, she hates that…

The latest step in this journey was to release an SDK (That’s Software Development Kit to you and me) to make things simpler for Android developers wanting to work with Mendeley. An early public access version is now available on GitHub which provides model objects and packages and takes care of authentication.

We’ll of course be looking to improve the API  because, as any good geek knows, no code is ever finished and we know there’s a long way to go! With that in mind please send us your feedback. You can email api@mendeley.com and reach out to @mendeleyAPI on Twitter.

For  all the latest news on the API and Developer Tools, also be sure to follow the Mendeley API Blog

Read and add Pubmed papers to Mendeley on your Android device with Pubchase

drgunn2 Comments
Mendeley - PubChase Sync

If you’re a life science researcher, you’re in luck. There’s now a way for you to search PubMed and add to your Mendeley library from your Android device. Pubchase is a new Android app from Zappylabs, a mobile development company that specializes in life science. Here’s what the app offers:

  • Search PubMed and add papers to your Mendeley library from your Android device (works on iOS too).
  • Read your Mendeley papers* on your Android device
  • Get life-science specific recommendations from PubChase, based on your Mendeley library, with no need to build a separate library in PubChase.

PubChase also has a neat section with essays written by other researchers about papers which may be of interest to you. Please note, however, this is just a way to get PubMed papers from Android into Mendeley and Mendeley papers into PubChase. PubChase isn’t a Mendeley app. Here’s what Lenny from PubChase has to say:

The forte of ZappyLab is mobile and web technology. We have no plans to build citation management plugins. So, from the beginning, we wanted to make it easy for our users to import their libraries from Mendeley, Papers, Endnote, and other software. However, adding newly recommended papers to your PubChase library means that you then have to export your PubChase library to the other software when writing a paper. The Mendeley sync greatly simplifies this process. Though our Endnote and Papers users keep asking for a similar integration, those tools do not have open APIs, so it is not an option for us. Therefore, we will be focusing our developmental efforts on deeper integration with Mendeley.

The conclusion of that paragraph is precisely why we make the Mendeley API available and we’re happy to feature them on our Developer Portal. We hope to see great things from PubChase and from all the other talented developers using our platform to serve their constituents.

To get started with PubChase and the Mendeley Sync, follow the instructions at Pubchase.

*I know many of you are disappointed we don’t have an official Android app for Mendeley. We’re working on it for the new year and think PubChase and Mendeley will be a nice pair for life science researchers who use Android.

Mendeley on Android – An app guide

Jason Hoyt14 Comments

One of the big reasons we created the Open APIs into Mendeley data was because we knew we’d never have the time or resources to create everything that you want and we want. Having Mendeley on mobile devices is obviously a big need. That’s why it is great to see third party developers take our APIs and build either full out Mendeley clients, or tiny apps that perform a specific task on a mobile device. Some developers have also tapped into the local storage to build apps. In no particular order then, here are several apps that you can start using on Android enabled devices: Read More »

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 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 »