I'd like to elaborate on Ken's suggestion: I'm using the mind mapping software Freeplane to organise concepts for my research, and would love to be able to link directly to papers in Mendeley. (As an aside, yes, Sciplore is another Freemind fork designed for this purpose and caters for citation links using BibTeX, but Freeplane is the better tool, and available in the Ubuntu repositories). While it's not trivial to allow linking into Mendeley items, either a switched command option (like mendeley-desktop -c Evans2011) or some kind of Mendeley handled URL that uses the BibTeX citation key would help to ease the worklow when using multiple applications. Currently it's a matter of copying the citation key and searching in Mendeley, which is hardly taxing, but it is a little cumbersome. Also, it's not possible to link to Mendeley web, certainly not using the citation key, which isn't even searchable.

I've actually done a little work (i.e. tinkering in a spreadsheet) on a more advanced idea based on this need. It involves assigning all papers a 'relevance' score based on the history of file opening. It's not a trivial problem to solve, and it would require updating a table of scores (two float values per paper) every time a paper is opened (this is in preference of holding raw opening history data for each file), and sorting by this score (sum of the two values) for the proposed view.

A file that has just been opened recently would shoot to the top (at least within the top few) and if not reopened would, over say a few days descend down the rankings to take its place in the rankings based on longer term (but 'recency'-weighted) history.

I honest expect that this kind of view would be the main port of call for researchers when they start up Mendeley Desktop.

The functionality I'm particularly looking for is the ability to have soemthing like:

title:((dcis OR "ductal carcinoma in situ") mammography) microcalcifications journal:nature added:7-14 year:1999-2005

This is a rather precise search, but such terms would be really useful individually.

I'm having trouble finding out how I even knew about the google-like (x:y) searching. Perhaps you could have an FAQ entry (speaking of which, a proper help section would be nice) detailing the syntax and all attribute names.

Absolutely the standard user interface should be as friendly as possible, but it would be great to have another search facility (separate from the one currently residing in the top right corner) to filter the database in a more comprehensive manner from within Mendeley.