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.





• 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.

Here’s a problem some of you may be familiar with. You’re browsing the Mendeley research catalog and you come across a really great paper, or maybe you see an update from one of your colleagues pointing to something you’d like to read, only to find that you have to leave Mendeley to log in to your library’s website and search all over again to be able to download the actual paper. It’s a little jarring to switch interfaces like that, and more than a little inefficient. Fret no more, my friends. (more…)

Today brings a major new update for Mendeley Web as well as a new Development Preview of Mendeley Desktop. Here’s a short list of some of the improvements: (more…)

We didn’t quite make it in time for OA week, but I hope we’ll be forgiven, because we have an AWESOME feature that we just quietly launched. It’s now possible to filter the 27 million canonical documents in the Mendeley research catalog for articles published in Open Access journals. (more…)

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:
(more…)

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.

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.

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.

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:

• (Mac) Improved the look and feel of the toolbar on Mac.

• (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.

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:

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:

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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!

If you haven’t seen it yet, go and have a look – we’ve updated Mendeley.com! We’ve created two new sections in which we hope to give you a bit more information about us and to provide better support for the fast-growing Mendeley community.

About Us

Here you can learn more about Mendeley and all the magnificient people who are helping build it. And this doesn’t even include our Community Liaisons, interns, Lead Users, and all the other supporters we have world-wide.

We’ve also created a little showcase to display the awards we’ve won recently (yeah, reasonably proud of it… but we have to say that this is also due to all of your incredibly helpful user feedback which just makes Mendeley better with every release!). As you can also see in this section, many large universities have either recommended or linked to us, and we’ve already had many good reviews talking about Mendeley.

As you may also remember, we recently published some teaching materials. Hopefully our new “Spread the word” section is an even easier way for you to access these now. Let us know if this is helpful for you and how we can further improve this!

Support

In our new support section we help you to get started with Mendeley. You will also find our FAQ has been slightly redesigned. To get in touch with our support team (the “Stability Liberation Front” & “Mean to Bugs, Kind to Ponies” guys) to report a bug or to request a feature, visit our feedback forum. Watch out though, we are currently planning to set up a more extensive and detailed online manual for Mendeley. This manual will be wiki based too, so you can also become active and share your hints! Phew… ah, and the next release is also not far away…

Enjoy the new pages!

As one of the many requested features from our feedback page, Mendeley Web now supports COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). COinS is an open and easy to use specification for publishing OpenURL bibliographic metadata in HTML. On web pages, embedded COinS can be read and processed by applications.

Also Mendeley’s Web Importer can now identify COinS embedded on other websites. This information can then be easily imported into your Mendeley research library. In addition, a COinS section is embedded in each of our article pages. This means that other bookmarklets can extract and process the information from Mendeley’s article pages.

Addendum: COinS are not only embedded in article pages but also in profile pages (own publications list) and in public collection pages.