It would be nice to hear from the developers. Could you take position on this issue: are you going to put this idea under review or to decline it? So that I will take my position accordingly.

I can tell aabout my use case. The point of having detailed citation keys is to be able to recognize immediately, when editing a Latex document, what paper each citation refers to, and so being able to edit much more quickly my texts when I have to move a citation around or delete it. For example, if I want to delete from the references I am citing the paper by Mustermann et al. on the tails of gold fish, but keep their paper on their dorsal fins, it is way quicker when I have a citation that reads cite{Mustermann_et_al_1970_gold_fish_tails, Mustermann_et_al_1972_gold_fish_dorsal_fins} than if I have a citation that says cite{Mustermann1970, Mustermann1972}. In this last case I would have to check what each citation corresponds to, unless I also recall the publication year for each paper, which is not always the case.

I have just noticed that there is another user proposal which is quite similar to this, and marked as started: http://mendeley.uservoice.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/321669-improve-support-for-citation-keys-?ref=title

I had probably missed it when I submitted this (it seems that proposal is older than this) because it does not contain the word "Bibtex"
It does not mention explicitly key customization though, so this proposal is not a duplicate of that. I find key customization useful because when I read the latex code for a document I am writing I am sure of what I cited (something that with keys like Smith2004 is not always immediately obvious).

To neil.ernst: I have not yet understood whether this "citation key" field is what I mentioned in my previous comment or not. What I understand now is that I can write my own key manually in that field. I would like to generate *automatically* keys based on a scheme that I choose: is that possible?

I have downloaded today the new version of Mendely with the Bibtex synchronization. First of all: it is a very nice step forward. There is still one thing (at least for me) that is very important, and it is to be able to automatically create citation keys according to my own scheme; I prefer to insert in the citation the journal name and a few words of the title too. As things are set now, Mendeley would overwrite any key that I generate with another program in the bibtex files that Mendeley keeps in sync. In any case - kudos for the good work.

I too would favor a bit a built-in PDF viewer over a "full-screen" option, because it would give the possibility to browse easily through a pdf collection