Hi, Ian, can you comment on this-- the end of the year was a while ago. Is there some movement on annotation, and other sorts of Mendeley support, for iPad? Ideally, would need to be able to surf and import refs on the ipad, and in the process transfer PDFs etc to a server, link those docs to their entries in the Mendeley library, annotate and tag them, and sync those tags and annotations so that all works on the desktop, too....

Mustaqil Ali,
Can you give us a sense for your timing. This request has been up for a long time, and you indicated that you plan to implement it over a year ago. So, can we really expect that this will happen?

Please allow sorting by multiple columns! ie., Lastname, Firstname, Title. Or Date, Lastname, First, Title... etc.

@robert.knight: Basically, as it is, zotero is so far superior to Mendeley for finding and importing references into a library. So, there's a need for one's Zotero library to remain a living, breathing thing. A one-way sync means that information flow is from Zotero into Mendeley, but not back in the other direction. Which means that any work done in Mendeley does not transfer back to Zotero, and so using Mendeley means the Zotero library is always out of date.
Also, regarding Forrest's point, that's so true -- Zotero works really well for formatting docs, but is weak on PDF reading and does not seem to be developing any PDF reader, iPad/tablet app, or better tagging interface any time soon. Mendeley' is a good PDF reader, and is at least beginning to develop for tablets (although there is a long way to go). So we need to use both. But right now, we can't use both, because Mendeley doesn't share back to Zotero.

What's really needed is an effortless two-way sync, with no exporting or tidying up to be done each time.

Agreed! Also-- my first attempt to access my zotero catalog from Mendely wound up with tons of errors (editors listed as authors, etc.). Can this be corrected?

Hi. Can Mendeley search in sticky notes for text? Is that a possible addition?

Yes, this is necessary! Goodness. And it should be possible to add any field as a column heading (ie., advisor, column, cast, reporter, etc.) and include that field within the custom sort order.

Custom fields-- a must! Would be especially useful for scans of historical documents and archival materials. For instance a series of telegraphed messages would include the telegraph number, date sent, sender, recipient, and columns for sorting would allow you to sort a series of communications between two users by date, to recreate the conversation. Custom fields are also useful for internal filing, ordering, and coding (beyond just tags).

robert.knight,
Well, the thing I'm most concerned about is that Mendeley doesn't really seem to be addressing the issues its users are most concerned about. I'm particularly interested in being able to tag papers more effectively (ie., by being able to apply tags to notes / annotations, and not just papers, or to portions of text). Also, I'm very interested in having a more accurate search feature - we're talking about very detailed databases of a lot of information, and yet the search is essentially a wide-open keyword search. The result of these searches is that that you get your whole library returned to you... The main point is that requests for simple bug fixes and/or relatively basic features have been lingering on this list for years without being addressed, without moving to the "started" status, etc. This is tough, because we'd all like to use Mendeley and the concept shows great promise. Implementation is still lacking, responsiveness to emerging needs is not there, which worries users who hope Mendeley will be a vibrant multi-platform reference manager...

Thanks!

This is the Holy Grail of bibliographic software. Allowing users to tag selected text, or allowing annotations to also contain tags, and then providing ways of accessing tagged text and notes via the user interface, would make Mendeley the most useful piece of research software available. The comparison to NVIVO is apt-- this would, in fact, make qualitative analysis available to a much wider group of users, and would get past NVIVO's major problem (beyond the fact that it can't accurately provide PDF formatting), namely that all documents once entered into NVIVO must remain there, instead of residing in folders on a computer or network.

The 'tagging text' functionality currently exists in a.nnotate.com, but the a.nnotate user interface is not as intuitive or as well suited to using multiple documents.

Finally, it must be noted that as users begin to maintain libraries of PDFs and other formats on their computers, these documents include quite long texts, and tagging, when applied to a whole document, is too blunt of an instrument. Tagging a PDF of Moby Dick with the tag "whale" does not really help a user to locate material that is important to an argument or analysis. Rather, there should be a series of (preferably nested, hierarchically ordered) tags available - ie., "whale symbology" "fear of death" "the color white". Searches for all sections tagged with "whale symbology" and "fear of death" would allow for an analysis of the author's use of symbols, and Mendeley would be a key tool for conducting close textual analysis.... Similarly for science research, identifying all mentions of a series of conditions that apply simultaneously (ie., cancerous cells, fatty diets, northern climate...) would allow for useful analysis of the relevant literature beyond merely pointing out that somewhere in a particular paper all of these things are mentioned.