Tag: New release

Mendeley Desktop 1.13 Released – Faster Sync & Catalog Import

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:

md-113-win-update-details-1-cropped

Mendeley will then refresh the details with the latest version of the entry from our catalog:

md-113-win-update-details-2-cropped

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:

md-113-win-update-details-catalog-cropped

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.

Quicker Literature Reviews with the Mendeley Desktop 1.11 Preview

Robert Knight25 Comments

Today we’re announcing a preview of the next release of Mendeley Desktop, which adds an experimental feature to help you explore papers and find relevant information in them more quickly. This improved reading experience is initially available for Open Access papers, but we’re hoping to expand it to additional content in future.

Table of Contents

We automatically analyze the hierarchical structure of papers, identify the main headings and present them in the ‘Contents‘ tab. From the ‘My Library’ tab, you can browse supported papers and jump directly to the section of the document you are interested in.

health-toc

Figures

We attempt to identify tables and figures that appear in the paper and list them in the ‘Summary‘ tab. You can  then select a table or figure to jump directly to the relevant section of the paper.

cancer-screen-coverage-figure

Tables of Data

Tables in the paper are located, the data is extracted from them, and the results presented in a normalised style for easier reading. You can also export the data by clicking the drop-down arrow in the header for the table and selecting ‘Copy as HTML‘. From there you can paste the data into a spreadsheet such as Excel for quick analysis or visualization.

word-segmentation-results-table

Getting the Preview

Initially, we’re making this feature available for papers in our catalog that have been identified as Open Access. To see examples of enrichments:

    1. Download the preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.11
    2. Go to the ‘Literature Search’ pane in Mendeley Desktop, click the magnifying glass icon in the search box and select ‘Open Access’ to limit your search to open access papers.
    3. Search for a topic that interests you
    4. Browse the results. When you select a paper, if we’ve automatically extracted an outline, tables and figures then they will appear in the ‘Contents’ and ‘Summary’ tabs in the right-hand pane.

Feedback

This is a new and experimental feature which we’re making available for early feedback. We know that we have plenty of work to do to expand coverage to more papers and improve the recall and accuracy of extraction, especially for tables with more complex layouts.

The research that enabled this feature was developed as part of the EU-funded CODE project, with partners at the University of Passau and the Know-Center in Graz.

Join Us!

Would you like to help us make the lives of researchers easier? Interested in developing algorithms for data extraction, working with a library of the world’s research or creating beautiful apps for scientists? We’re looking for a data scientist to help us extract information from papers and engineers to help bring the fruits of their work to users on desktops , mobile devices and the web. If you’d like to be involved – please get in touch! For examples of the R&D work we’ve been doing internally and with univeristies, see the Mendeley profiles of Roman and Kris.

Mendeley Desktop 1.7 Preview

Robert Knight22 Comments

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.7 is available. This release makes it easier to use custom and 3rd-party citation styles, includes an updated plugin for citing your Mendeley documents in Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac and includes a number of improvements to search.

 

Citation Styles

  • Easier sharing and installation of custom and 3rd-party styles. Go to View → Styles → More Styles → Get More Styles , paste a link to a style in the box and click ‘Download’. You can also drag and drop citation style (CSL) files into the styles dialog.
  • We have refreshed the available library of citation styles from the citationstyles.org repository. This adds many new styles.

Updated Mac Word 2011 Plugin

The Mac Word plugin has been updated for Word 2011 on Mac. The updated plugin has a more obvious UI for inserting citations and bibliographies. It is also much faster when refreshing medium to large bibliographies.  Word 2008 is still supported, but it will continue to use the earlier plugin which is accessible from the ‘Script’ menu in Word.

 

Search

Internal search has been overhauled in this release.  Many of the changes are internal to improve consistency, performance and stability.  There are a number of user-visible changes:

  • Search is now incremental across full text and metadata.
  • Search is faster and more stable when searching many large PDFs.
  • More consistent behavior between full text, document details and citation editor search.
  • Search now finds and shows matches for the search keywords in all metadata fields.
  • Improved handling of boolean queries (with AND, OR and ‘-‘ (NOT) terms).
  • Spelling corrections will now include suggestions from the full text as well as document details.

Other Improvements

  • The look and organization of the menus and toolbars have been streamlined on Windows and Linux.  The Mac version had a UI overhaul in the previous release, so we thought it was only fair to give a little love to the Windows and Linux versions.
  • Improvements to import of RIS files generated by RefMan
  • Updated tab-switching shortcuts that are more consistent with web browsers (Chrome, Firefox).
  • Improved performance for BibTeX sync and batch metadata edits.  We’ve also fixed a number of causes of UI ‘hiccups’ (sometimes referred to as lag) when using the app.
  • Import suggestions. Mendeley Desktop will notice when you tend to import PDFs from the same locations repeatedly and will offer to automatically import other articles from the same folder.

As always, we really appreciate help from early adopters helping us get the next release into shape.  Please download the preview and let us know if you find any issues.  You can report any issues on our support forum .  You can also suggest improvements our UserVoice forum.

For the full list of fixes and improvements, please see the release notes.

Mendeley 1.1 Desktop now available: Citation plugin improvements, faster web content, and more!

drgunn9 Comments

Update (30/09/11):  Unfortunately we’ve had a small number of users report a connectivity issue with the Mendeley Desktop v1.1 release on some Windows systems which we did not encounter during testing.  Our developers are working hard on a reliable solution to bring you the best experience possible. A Mendeley Desktop v1.1.1 release resolving the issue will be rolled out sometime in the next few days.  Until then, we’ve removed the v1.1 download from our servers, and encourage you to use the previous Mendeley Desktop v1.0.1 release instead.  We apologize to those of you affected – we will release the fix asap.  Thanks for your patience.

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Mendeley 1.1 is now available. There are several notable improvements to the citation insertion functionality, as well as significant under-the-hood bugfixes and speed + appearance tweaks. You can read the full release notes here.

Highlights

  • Mendeley now peacefully co-exists with Track Changes in MS Word.
  • Inserting citations and refreshing the document is much faster.
  • Watched folders now work much better on the Mac
  • Check for Duplicates decisions are now persistent

Interface tweaks include better performance of web content in the desktop client and smaller download/update sizes. Many old UI issues have also been resolved.

Please download and update to Mendeley 1.1 now.

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.

New Web Release – Search Edition. Group search, better OA search and more!

drgunn1 Comment

This week’s update to Mendeley Web has a some search enhancements that should make it a little easier to find things on Mendeley Web. The main addition is search for groups. Now that we have over 50,000 groups created by people sharing research on a topic with their colleagues, publishing curated lists, or just having a bit of fun, finding groups by invitation or through your contacts’ profiles isn’t quite enough.Read More »

Mendeley is now more social: featuring collaborative groups, in-app tutorial, & updated citation styles.

drgunn17 Comments

This week we have released a new version of Mendeley with some major updates. The major new feature in Mendeley 0.9.8.1 is public collaborative groups.

What are groups?

Groups are a simple way for you to collaborate with your colleagues to create a shared collection of documents. Groups allow members to put together a list of papers and share notes. There are three types of groups:
Read More »

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.7 Released

Ricardo Vidal11 Comments

If you have opened Mendeley Desktop since yesterday, you will have noticed that we have a new major release available and ready for auto-update.

Among the new features and improvements we would like to mention the re-designed Document Details pane on the right-hand side.

Mendeley PDF and side pane document details

Also new to this release is the ability to upgrade your Mendeley account. By upgrading your current free account (which will always be free!) to one of our premium options, you have access to more Web space for your personal and shared collections and the possibility to collaborate with larger groups.

Mendeley upgrade plans

Overall, there have been a lot of improvements made both on the interface and functional level with clearer dialogs and information display. For our Mac users, there have been quite a few UI improvements too and the Cmd+H shortcut properly hides the window!

This release includes a few bug fixes, improvements on existing features such as faster syncing and better sticky notes, and introduces some important new features. The release notes can be seen here.

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please e-mail support.

Mendeley Desktop 0.9.6.3 Released

Robert Knight8 Comments

Already live via auto-update since last week but we just wanted to let everyone know about this minor update which amongst other things improves the look and feel of the toolbar on Mac. It also addresses several problems with annotation syncing, problems installing the Word plugin on some systems and general stability.

Further user interface improvements are planned for the next release so rest assured that this is just the beginning. Here is the complete list of changes for this release:

New Features and Improvements
  • (Mac) Improved the look and feel of the toolbar on Mac.
Bug Fixes
  • (Windows) Fixed ‘Invalid procedure call’ error when working with some Word documents which contain Mendeley-generated citations.
  • Fixed several sporadic crashes related to the search and de-duplication features.
  • Fixed several sync errors which could occur when syncing annotations.
  • Fixed several crashes related to the Word/OpenOffice/Mac Word plugins.
  • Fixed several crashes related to the notification bar.
  • Fixed several crashes related to importing PDFs which are already in your library.
  • Fixed annotation creation times being displayed incorrectly in timezones outside of GMT.
  • Fixed sticky notes not being exported correctly via File -> Export with annotations.
  • Added a limit to the number of citations that are extracted from a single PDF and reduce the number of citations extracted with poor-quality metadata.
  • Reduced memory usage when handling large file attachments.
  • Fixed ‘LinkToMendeleyVba2.dll not found’ message on some Windows PCs.
  • Made database updates safer when installing new versions of Mendeley Desktop.
  • Fixed the problem where Document Details hide/show toggle in menu did not always work correctly.
  • Fixed sticky notes not being restored when restoring backups.
  • Fixed annotation syncing problems when file organizer is enabled
  • Fix a freeze during the ‘Downloading files’ syncing step.
  • Preserve author ordering correctly when importing from Zotero.
  • (Mac) Fixed crash when entering accented characters (eg. umlauts) in authors field in Document Details tab.
  • (Mac) Included more detailed information in crash reports sent from Mendeley Desktop.
  • (Mac) Fixed crash when importing some corrupted PDFs.
  • (Mac) Experimental support for international versions of Microsoft Word for Mac.
  • (Linux) Fixed README file being installed to /usr in Ubuntu version.

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 e-mail support.