Tag: mac word plugin

How-to series: How to merge contiguous citations with word plugin [part 9 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal1 Comment

One of the great built-in features in Mendeley is without a doubt the citation plugin for your word processor of choice. We currently support most of popular word processors such as MS word (Mac and Windows), OpenOffice, Neo Office, and Libre Office. We’re continuously working to improve the efficiency and general user interface of this plugin because we feel it is an important component within Mendeley Desktop and your overall research workflow.

That being said, I’d like to touch on a small aspect that many Mendeley citation plugin users are probably unaware of. If you add multiple citations at the same time, the appropriate citation style is used for such situations. For example, if you were citing 3 articles and they were the 3rd, 4th and 5th citations added, they’d probably be added as follows 3-5 (if using a numeric inline citation style format like “Nature Genetics”.). However, if you went in to the document and wanted to add another reference in that bundle, it would show up as 3-5 6. That is not good.
Quick solution? Delete the citations and add all four together. Which would mean remembering which reference they were, selecting all four and adding them in again.

Better solution? Merge the citations! Just select the 3-5 and 6 citation and then go to your citation plugin options in your word processor and select Merge citations. The end result should be 3-6. No need to go track down the references again. Just select, merge. Done.

Check out this quick 2 minute video showcasing our Word plugin:

Here are the previous eight entries in our How-to series:

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.5 released

Paul Foeckler13 Comments

The main priority is still to polish existing features by fixing a lot of usability issues and bugs. We also continue working on speed and stability and rest assured – work on the Mac Word Plugin has now officially been started. We’ll let you know as soon as we have an alpha version ready for testing.

Improvements to Existing Features:

  • Improved concurrent editing of documents by multiple users. Tags and keywords changes are now merged correctly and conflict resolution is improved.
  • Add support for disambiguating citations in Word and OpenOffice.
  • Improve the performance of bibliography generation and citation insertion in Word and OpenOffice.
  • Mendeley Desktop can now import PDF, BibTeX and RIS files which do not have the .pdf, .bib or .ris file extension. Mendeley Desktop will attempt to guess the type of the file in this case.
  • Support for importing .txt files which may contain references in various formats.
  • Support importing of month field from BibTeX where month name is not enclosed in quotes or braces.
  • HTML attachments are now indexed for full text search (note that this will not apply to existing attachments).
  • Show a wizard on first run offering to set up word processor integration.
  • Clearer formatting of dates in the table view.
  • Add support for superscript and subscript formatting of in-line citations.
  • Add a menu item to toggle the visiblity of the right-hand Document Details pane.
  • Support for additional fields and document types in BibTeX import and export.
  • Support for additional document types in RIS import and export.
  • Show different icons in the table view depending on the file type, number of files attached to a document and whether the file is stored locally or downloadable from the web.
  • Automatically enable the ‘Citation Key’ field in the Document Details pane when BibTeX syncing is enabled.
  • Support for importing file links from EndNote XML files (currently tested with EndNote X2, X3 XML files).
  • Add keyboard shortcuts for moving between tabs, creating folders and toggling the Document Details pane.
  • Clearer messages in the Word and OpenOffice.org plugins.
  • When importing PDFs through the ‘Watched Folders’ feature, the existing library is searched for duplicates of imported documents.
  • Improved performance of first PDF import after starting Mendeley.
  • (Mac) Mendeley Desktop offered to install the NeoOffice plugin even when NeoOffice was not installed.
  • (Linux) Add a README file to the generic Linux version of Mendeley Desktop.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed various hangs and crashes on exit when background services (such as the file organiser) were enabled.
  • The location of the Zotero database was not auto-detected if Firefox was not using the default profile.
  • Hyperlinks in PDF documents did not work reliably.
  • Fix crash when opening certain invalid PDF documents.
  • Removed non-working support for unchecking sub-folders of a watched folder.
  • Import documents directly into the ‘My Publications’ collection did not work.
  • Progress of syncing operations is now shown as a percentage instead of number of documents and citations updated.
  • Fix a bug where document addition date/times were stored in local time internally and would be incorrect after a timezone or daylight savings change.
  • The document type combo-box now updates correctly after a DOI/Arxiv/PubMed lookup.
  • Improved syncing performance.
  • ‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ menu command now generates a citation key for the selected document(s) if necessary.
  • Application interface could hang whilst performing a database upgrade or repair.
  • Search index could go out of date causing documents which should match the search keywords not to be found.
  • Search did not always find all relevant full text matches.
  • Auto-update checks did not work properly in release candidate versions.
  • (Mac) The account password field was cleared when opening the preferences dialog.

Feedback and Support

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum at http://feedback.mendeley.com. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.