Tag: New release

Mendeley v0.9.6.1 released

victorhenning15 Comments

We’re happy to announce several new features and important upgrades in this latest release. The most important ones are:

Bibliography generator plugin for Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac:

bibliography-generator

This has been one of the most frequently requested features by our Mac users – now it’s here! Therefore, bibliography creation is now supported in Word and OpenOffice on all three platforms (Win, Mac and Linux). It’s just the first iteration, so we’ll continue to work on it and add more functionality. Please let us know what you think at http://feedback.mendeley.com.

Collaborative PDF annotation using sticky notes and highlights:

annotationsync

This has been a repeated request by research groups, labs and departments using Mendeley. PDF sticky notes and highlights are now synced with Mendeley Web, meaning that in Shared Collections you can now see each of your colleagues’ annotations separately and color-coded. In addition, there’s a major upgrade to the PDF viewer – it will now render the displayed PDF document instantly, no more pre-caching!

XMP metadata now extracted from PDFs:

This is a behind-the-scenes upgrade – Mendeley will now read embedded XMP metadata from PDFs where available (Nature and Elsevier journals, among others, now provide this routinely), boosting the metadata extraction quality. Even where there is no embedded XMP metadata, the algorithms for detecting authors and titles have also been improved.

Because of necessary changes to our server architecture, older Mendeley Desktop versions are required to upgrade to this latest beta version to continue using Mendeley’s online features – we’ll try not to make a habit of doing this.

Here is the full list of improvements and bug fixes:

New features
  • PDF annotations are now synchronized with Mendeley Web. In shared collections multiple users can add notes or highlights to documents.
  • Added an importer for Ovid Reprints/Medlars format files.
  • PDF import will make use of embedded XMP metadata if it is present and appears to be accurate.
  • (Mac) First version of Mac Word plugin. Please note: Currently the Mac Word plugin supports Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac. Word 2004 and earlier are not yet supported.
Improvements to existing features
  • Added keyboard shortcuts for selecting, highlighting and adding notes.
  • Newly imported documents are highlighted after import.
  • The updater will now ask for the administrator password if necessary during update installation on Linux and Mac.
  • Added ‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ action to documents list right-click menu.
  • Improvements to accuracy of automated author and title extraction from PDFs.
  • Add the ability to drag-and-drop any file type into Mendeley Desktop. If the file type is not supported by one of the importers then a new document is created with the file attached.
  • Smoother scrolling in PDF viewer.
  • ‘Search by Title’ and DOI lookups will now retain the full names of authors if the lookup comes back with only initials if the initials and the full names agree.
Bug fixes
  • Fixed a recent problem with links between new documents and file attachments being lost for some users when syncing and a message warning that recently synced documents had been deleted on Mendeley Web.
  • Fixed crashes when exiting full-screen mode in PDF viewer.
  • Fixed red border around PDF content on PowerPC Macs.
  • Fixed local library data not being migrated correctly when changing email address in Mendeley Desktop.
  • Added additional verification of backups before restoring to web in the ‘Restore Backup’ feature.
  • File space usage shown in Preferences dialog did not update after syncing.
  • Incorrect progress messages were shown in the status bar when importing a PDF.
  • Fixed problem where starting a ‘Search by Title’ lookup for one document and then switching to another document before the results came back would apply the changes to the wrong document.
  • Fixed crash when performing DOI lookups in ‘Add New Document’ dialog.
  • The PDF viewer no longer creates temporary copies of opened PDF files on disk.
  • Fixed problem where only the first page of certain multi-page PDFs were shown in the viewer.
  • Fixed problem where search in a PDF viewer tab would not find matches on the last page of the PDF.
  • Fixed file organiser renaming failing on Windows for documents where the title, authors or publication name contained double quotes.
  • If uploading a file to Mendeley Web fails because the file is too large, the sync now continues uploading other attachments.
  • Fixed a problem which could cause Mendeley Desktop to loop continuously during sync.
  • Fixed PARSEFAILED error when syncing if certain characters appeared in imported documents.
  • Fixed long delay when opening the citation style browser.
  • Fixed long delay when opening the Tools -> Options menu on some systems.
  • Fixed incorrect documents being shown when searching for certain tags.
  • Fixed error about LinkToMendeleyVba.dll not being found on some Windows systems.
  • Fixed various crashes when syncing after removing shared collections on the web.
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 e-mail support@mendeley.com. Thanks!

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.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.4 released

Paul Foeckler31 Comments

After a couple of dev preview releases we now released a new official version of Mendeley Desktop. As highly requested by our users this release includes LaTeX support and Zotero integration just to name some of the improvements. See a complete list of changes below:

[UPDATE 02/10/2009]: Still working on updating the Linux repositories.

New Features:

  • Option to manually or automatically import documents from Zotero.
  • Automatic library backups and easier restoration of backups.
  • Added support for multi-word institutional author names such as groups or organisations.
  • Improved LaTeX integration. Add option to automatically create and update a set of Bibtex files from your library and added ‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ menu entry to copy ‘cite{BibtexKey}’ text to clipboard.

Improvements to Existing Features:

  • Improved performance and reduced memory usage when syncing large amounts of data from and to Mendeley Web.
  • Quicker startup after importing a large number of PDF documents.
  • Make several additional actions in the Document Details tab undo-able: “Search by Title”, “Details are Correct”, and edits with multiple documents selected.
  • Added more citation styles, as well as an interface to search for styles.
  • Added separate per-collection options to control whether files are uploaded to and downloaded from Mendeley Web.
  • Added a safe-guard against older versions of Mendeley Desktop being used with a more recent database.
  • Added a cache for speeding up the opening of PDFs within Mendeley Desktop.
  • Identified and fixed a number of issues related to scrolling PDFs.
  • Improved the stability when rotating a PDF, and viewing attached highlights or annotations.
  • Switching to fullscreen mode should now take you to the most recently viewed page in the PDF, instead of the first page.
  • Include the URL of a reference when using the Word/OpenOffice plugins to cite a webpage.
  • Enable manually marking a document as needing review.
  • Better handling of linebreaks when copying text from the PDF viewer into the abstract field.
  • Windows: Allow non-administrator users to install the Word plugin.
  • Reduce the time taken to check for availability of Neo/OpenOffice on Mac.
  • Display a warning when entering a citation key manually which is already in use.
  • Support for searching for keywords in specific fields using ‘fieldname:keyword’ syntax has been extended to all plain text fields.
  • Show progress information whilst exporting documents.
  • Introduced sanity checking to ensure that any sync that would delete large amounts of documents are intended.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed various crashes and other glitches in the PDF viewer.
  • Fixed various bugs in the file organiser which could cause file copying/renaming to fail or lose link between file and Mendeley document.
  • Remove documents from collection instead of moving them to trash when Delete key is pressed.
  • Windows: Fixed an issue with the Word plugin reporting “Combobox not found”.
  • Fix freeze when downloading large numbers of documents from Mendeley Web.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur during the sync process.
  • Fixed problem where fields that had been cleared in Document Details tab were not synced correctly with Mendeley Web.
  • Fixed crash when viewing some copy protected / DRMed PDFs.
  • Fixed DOI or ArXiv ID lookups failing in some cases with valid identifiers.
  • Added support for inserting citations as superscript, or subscript, where appropriate with the Word and OpenOffice plugin.
  • Fixed import of multiple URLs and non-numeric pages fields from RIS files.
  • Fixed export of line breaks in notes and abstract field to Bibtex format.
  • Correctly handle adding notes to multiple documents simultaneously.
  • Gracefully detect the version of OpenOffice available and handle plugin installation accordingly.
  • Fixed a number of issues with file renaming and the File Organizer.
  • Highlighting of search keywords in results did not work if search query was quoted or ended with a trailing space.
  • Fixed order of URLs in URLs field not being kept when closing and restarting program.
  • Some fields (Cast, Producers) were never saved to local database.
  • Fixed a character encoding bug when syncing collections.
  • Older (PowerPC-based) Macs: Fix a bug with the PDF viewer, so PDFs are now displayed in the correct colors.
  • Older (PowerPC-based) Macs: Fixed a bug that prevented exporting files to BibTex.

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.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.2.1 released

Paul Foeckler15 Comments

On our way to improved stability this is an update which addresses several problems with the search/filter feature, crashes in the PDF viewer and missing menu items. Its older brother Mendeley Desktop v0.9.2 beta was available for a week but we decided to add one more fix and hold back this blog post. The auto-update is now set from v0.9.1 beta to v0.9.2.1 beta directly.

So which bugs did we address specifically:

  • Fix search index becoming out of date and not returning all relevant documents when using search/filter feature
  • Fix crash when selecting ‘Delete Documents’ in File menu with no documents selected
  • Fix ‘Remove From Collection’ and ‘Restore Documents’ actions missing from File menu
  • Fix ‘OR’ queries in search filter not working
  • Fix ‘Delete Document’ toolbar action appearing twice when right-clicking context menu in documents list
  • Fix non-latin characters in CSL (Citation Style Language) files not being rendered correctly
  • Fix sticky notes being listed in reverse order in right-hand panel in PDF viewer
  • Fix ‘in trash’/’not in trash’ status for documents not being synced correctly for documents in collections
  • Clarify licensing of the Word/OpenOffice.org plugin code and update copyright text in Help -> About dialog, make licensing information easier to find on Mac
  • Add command-line option to ignore SSL errors
  • Fix auto-update download progress bar not being visible
  • Make auto-update download cancel-able
  • Fix a problem when migrating from 0.6.5 to 0.9.x if the user had created more shared groups than collections in My Library
  • Fix syncing error if a document’s title was set to a non-empty whitespace string in Mendeley Desktop
  • (Windows) Allow a custom storage location for Mendeley’s data to be specified in the registry
  • (Mac) Fix Find Next/Previous buttons being visible in PDF viewer when no search term had been entered
  • (Mac) Fix problems with settings migration from 0.6.5 to 0.9.x

As always, if you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting our feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.

To see what has changed in previous updates of Mendeley visit our release notes page.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.1 released

Paul Foeckler3 Comments

This update addresses a number of issues with Mendeley Desktop v0.9.0.:

Improvements to Existing Features

  • Automatic Pubmed/Crossref title search during metadata extraction if no identifiers (DOI, ArXiv, PMID) are found
  • Hide the notification bar asking for login details when applicable
  • Improved the presentation of search results
  • Added tooltips to the document list for items that aren’t displayed in full
  • Improved detection and handling of unsuccessful responses from Mendeley Web during a sync
  • Increased stability of the internal PDF viewer (more work is to follow on this)
Bug Fixes
  • Enable lookups from Google Scholar to verify document details
  • Fixed a crash when account details were entered or changed
  • Fixed an issue with file links being lost for documents in watched folders
  • Fixed an issue where multiple copies of a note would be added when editing several documents at once
  • Fixed an issue that prevented exporting libraries as BibTeX format
  • Fixed an issue related to closing Mendeley Desktop during a document import
  • A small number of other minor bug fixes that affected the overall stability
  • Fixed a problem with the system PATH variable when installing the Word plugin

Besides releasing a new version of Mendeley Desktop we also updated our catalog of research papers, the people directory, public collection pages, and the online library.

Now you’re also able to import articles from APA PsycNET, IACR ePrints, and RePEc.

To see what has changed in previous updates of Mendeley visit our release notes page.

Server upgrade ahead

Paul Foeckler2 Comments

Just a quick update to let you know that we are in the process of upgrading our current server setup, which is struggling a bit lately. We’ll have much more processing power, memory, better reliability and and and … in short, the website and syncing will perform much better.

Also, another Mendeley Desktop update is on it’s way. This will fix most bugs which have been reported last week. More about that later.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.0 released

Paul Foeckler25 Comments

This update introduces a lot of new features, including a PDF viewer, OpenOffice.org integration on Mac OSX and Linux, and many more. Interface issues, and a number of bugs are also addressed in this release, as well as improvements to the overall stability.

Just to give you a teaser – this is how it looks like to add notes to PDF documents:
Annotate PDFs

New Features:
  • Built-in PDF viewer for viewing PDFs directly in Mendeley Desktop
  • Support for annotating PDF files (syncing notes to and from Mendeley Web is planned for the next release)
  • Many additional online lookups (CrossRef, PubMed, Google Scholar)
  • Public document collections (reading lists) which can be embedded on other websites
  • OpenOffice.org Writer plugin for Mac OSX & Linux
  • Improved native user interface for Mac OSX
  • Individual synchronization and privacy settings for each document collection
  • Auto-save changes and undo functionality for quick document detail editing
  • Flagging documents as favorites
  • Marking a document as read, or unread
  • Detecting duplicate documents when importing library files or PDFs
  • Merging together document authors, tags, keywords or publications
  • Editing document details, or tags for multiple documents simultaneously
  • New “Trash” collection so you can restore deleted documents
Improvements to Existing Features:
  • Changes to the toolbar and terminology in light of usability tests
  • Better handling of documents with unconfirmed details
  • More robust synchronization between Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web
  • Search results are presented in a much easier to read format
  • Searching for documents now searches the document details, as well the PDF text
Bug Fixes:
  • Detect and handle duplicate citation keys being used when exporting to BibTeX format
  • Improved full-text indexing stability for search
  • Allow documents to be renamed without the file organizer being enabled
  • Clean up the formatting of exported citations
  • Handle tags and keywords properly when exporting to BibTex format
  • File organizer stability fixes
  • Corrections to various citation styles
  • Plus many more…

So no time to waste – visit our download page and give it a try, would be great to hear what you think! 🙂 Also, thanks a lot for all the feedback from our leadusers who helped us polishing this new version.

Please note: As part of the upgrade process, if you have an online account already, Mendeley Desktop will need to perform a full sync when it next starts. This may take some time depending on the size of your library. It is a one-off sync that is required to ensure compatibility with an upgraded sync method.

If you have suggestions how to improve managing research papers with the Mendeley reference manager please let us know by visiting our feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask, please e-mail us at support@mendeley.com.

Mendeley Desktop v0.6.5 released

Paul Foeckler20 Comments

After putting the installers on our website last week we now set the auto-update for Windows, Mac and Linux as well. This update adds integration with OpenOffice.org on Windows, fixes several file organiser problems as well as various bugs reported by users. Work is under way on the next update which will include an integrated PDF viewer and many usability improvements to the user interface.

New Features:

  • OpenOffice.org integration on Windows. To setup the OpenOffice.org plugin, restart Mendeley after installing the update and select Tools -> Install OpenOffice Plugin
    OpenOffice.org integration for Linux will be coming soon.

Improvements to Existing Features:

  • Conversion between LaTeX commands for accents and equivalent unicode characters when importing from or exporting to Bibtex
  • Add clickable link under URLs field to open current URL in a browser
  • Add link in Tools menu to install the website importer in your browser which lets you easily import citations from popular websites such as Amazon, Google Scholar and PLoS

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes for various problems when installing the Word plugin
  • Abstract field was not filled in when clicking PubMed lookup button in metadata tab
  • Fixed problem where file organiser did not always respect ‘sort into subfolders’ setting correctly
    on Windows
  • Fixed problem where file organiser could get stuck in an infinite loop, repeatedly copying the same files
  • Show more accurate progress information when organising files
  • Fix author extraction sometimes stripping out lower-case name parts such as ‘van’, ‘der’ etc.
  • Fixed problem on Windows where folder monitoring tried to re-import documents which had been explicitly removed from within Mendeley
  • After sorting the library view, the wrong metadata was shown in the right-hand pane
  • Improved RIS importer’s support for several non-standard fields
  • Fixed crash if a problem occurred loading the data files which support the metadata extraction algorithms
  • Export user’s notes to ‘annote’ rather than ‘note’ field in Bibtex to prevent the problem where the user’s reading notes could appear as part of the formatted citation in the rendered Latex document. Also import ‘comments’ field into the notes field in Mendeley.

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 email support@mendeley.com.

Release update

Paul Foeckler4 Comments

A couple of days ago we released our latest update of Mendeley. Details about feature improvements and bug fixes of Mendeley Desktop v0.6.4 can be found in my last blog entry, but I thought I just mention some of the improvements in Mendeley Web:

  • Improved grouping in online library
  • Introducing a simple document search
  • Support of two new sites for easy import (SpringerLink and WorldCat)
  • Duplicate detection for bookmarklet import

Next on the list for Mendeley Web is introducing group and network pages which are overdue for a long time. We are also working on a new site design which we’ll announce in a separate post soon.

Happy Easter! 🙂

Mendeley Desktop 0.6.3

Mike Arthur

The moons have once more aligned and we would like to announce the release of a new version of Mendeley Desktop for your software-using pleasure, including the Word plugin.

Thank-you all for your feedback, it’s really helped to shape this release. If you have any problems with Mendeley or you wish to request cool new stuff for us to add please visit our feedback forum, which is accessible through the Help menu.

New Features
  • PDF file organisation and renaming tool
  • Automatic extraction and retrieval of metadata for ArXiv papers
  • Lookup metadata for documents based on their PubMed ID
  • Invite other researchers who are not Mendeley contacts to join Shared Document Groups from within the program
  • Store and sync paper abstracts
  • Link to your Mendeley profile and online library in Mendeley Desktop
Improvements to Existing Features:
  • Author extraction improvements in the PDF importer – This release lays the groundwork for future metadata extraction improvements
  • Faster startup with large libraries
  • Reduce the number and duration of pauses during synchronisation, especially with large libraries
  • Improved auto-completion of authors
  • Allow deletion of documents in Recently Added and Ungrouped views
  • Display the number of documents in groups next to the group name
  • Warn the user if they accidentally try to add papers to ‘My Publications’ if they do not appear in the author list for that paper
  • Show number of PDFs uploaded/downloaded from Mendeley Web while syncing
  • More informative progress updates during PDF import
  • Import tags from Bibtex, RIS files
  • Export tags to Bibtex files
  • Word plugin installer integrated into Mendeley Desktop (Tools menu)
  • More citation styles for citation view and Word plugin
  • Bibliographies in Word plugin have hanging indents for certain styles
  • Various improvements to citation formatting
Bug Fixes (General)
  • More robust synchronisation – fixed many bugs which could occur whilst syncing
  • Various citation formatting improvements
  • Various Bibtex import fixes – Bibtex files generated by Google Scholar and Web of Science now import correctly
  • Support RefWorks-generated RIS files
  • Prevent pasting rich text into metadata fields which do not support it
  • Use case insensitive sorting in fields list and table view
  • Strip XML tags when exporting notes to Bibtex or RIS
  • Fix ‘Save’ button not being enabled when viewing un-corrected metadata until at least one of the fields had been changed
  • Removed in-line editing in table view as it was accidentally activated too easily
  • Fixed problems entering ISBN, ISSN information
  • Made several error messages less scary
  • Fix current article selection being lost when sorting library
  • Fixed imported documents being added to different groups if the user changed the selection while the import was in progress
  • Fixed searching for exact phrases using quotation marks
  • Stop trying to upload PDF files if account quota is reached
  • Fixed bug causing scary message about UUID clash
Bug Fixes (Windows)
  • Fixed crashes when importing certain PDFs on Windows
  • File auto-renamer could create file names which were too long on Windows
Bug Fixes (Mac)
  • Fixed crash during online metadata retrieval when importing PDFs
  • Now works on OSX systems which have Qt/KDE installed (fix possible crash on startup)
Bug Fixes (Linux)
  • Make Ubuntu package require the Qt 4 SQLite plugin
  • Now compatible with Qt 4.5