News
26th May 2011
We’ve just completed a major update to the server! See below for details...
Improvements to PubMed comparisons
Fewer comments
- When more than half of the authors are different, Merops alerts the whole name list, rather than alerting each name.
- Merops no longer alerts unknown journal titles in a reference that links to PubMed (if the journal title is the same).
- Merops no longer alerts unmatched words, if that word was found in the article on PubMed (with the same capitalization).
- A number of false alerts have been fixed.
Greater automation
- Merops can automatically update author initials, if the only difference is that PubMed has more initials, e.g. Jones, ABABC. This requires a Standard Set update, so you should see this happening by next week.
- Merops can automatically update author names if the only difference is that PubMed has an accented character, e.g. AntonanzasAntoñanzas. This requires a Standard Set update, so you should see this happening by next week. Please let us know if there are other occasions where you would like Merops to automatically change a reference to conform to PubMed.
More intuitive
- Comments on names are localized to given names or family names, to help you see the difference more quickly.
- Comments on article titles have highlighting, to show where the difference is, helping you find it faster.
Responses to feedback and error fixes and improvements
We’ve made over 2,000 other improvements since the February update - some big but mostly small. These include:
- Improved matching of abbreviations and capitalized terms
- Improved header recognition
- Improved recognition of heading hierarchy
- Preservation of table lines and cell shading as used by the author (an option to standardize these is now in development)
- Preservation of field codes
- Preservation of highlighting and colour
- Initial processing is 5% faster than ever before
Merops 2.8 is here!
11 March 2011
Merops 2.8 is now available to download from here.
It's our biggest upgrade ever, with 100s of new features and enhancements:
Much more powerful automatic text correction
Over 175 new customizable rules, including:
- Retrieve missing reference data from PubMed
- Alert/correct references discrepancies with PubMed
- Name/date to numeric reference conversion
- Numeric to name/date reference conversion
- Add hyperlinks on references to Amazon or WorldCat
- Alert duplicate references
- New 'Abbreviations' sub-module
- Delete repeated header items
- 14 new preferences for correspondence information
- 38 new individual word preferences
- 20 new non-English term preferences
Merops also now ships with two new Standard Sets: Chicago Manual of Style, and AMA Manual of Style.
Easier, faster, and more intuitive processing
- New flexible processing queue: add more files to the queue while others are being processed
- Merops automatically reconnects a lost connection, while processing continues on the server
- Improved Standard Set Editor:
- Improved handling of new rules: Leave all unset, then click a button to search through them in your own time
- Undo/Redo buttons added
- New 'Compare Standard Sets' and 'Send in Email' features
- Improved 'Find Setting' feature
Improved reviewing interface
- Brand new reference renumbering tools
- Brand new 'Insert Document Part' tools
- New improved 'Insert Symbol' menu, with many more symbols
- Watchfolder system now handle multiple files at once
- Create your own custom Look Ups
- New 'Abbreviation' property for custom terms
- Improved right-click menu in Microsoft Word
- Improved Merops Ribbon in Word 2007 and Word 2010
Major server update!
11 November 2010
We’ve just updated the Merops server! It’s even faster, more accurate, and more powerful than ever…
It’s SPEEDY!
Initial processing is now more than 66% faster than ever before! Averaging 39 words per second, it's nearly 3 times quicker than 6 months ago*, and the average journal article now processes in under 2 minutes.
*Actual increase is approx. 2.9×
Comparison to PubMed comments!
When Merops links a reference to PubMed, it can now alert you if the document title on PubMed is different to the one given by the author. You might be surprised how often authors make mistakes in the punctuation, hyphenation, spelling, or wording of a title, or omit subtitles. Depending on your current procedure, this feature will either significantly improve the quality of your work, or help you work much faster, or both.
Example
It's your call
Because PubMed isn't necessarily 100% accurate, it's entirely up to you whether to use the suggestion from PubMed. If you want to make the suggested replacement, you can right-click on the comment, click on the suggestion, and Merops will insert the new text for you.
New rules!
37 brand-new rules, including:
- Comparison to PubMed comments.
- New context rules for units: in footnotes, and in table captions and figure legends.
- Alert duplicate references.
- Replace affiliation footnote symbols with author initials.
Plus 10 existing rules have new settings requested by our users.
Over 1000 other fixes and improvements
We've focused heavily on the feedback we've received from your emails, and from the Send Feedback to Shabash tool. For example:
- Correct case after colon in reference document titles is now applied.
- Retrieved author names from PubMed are now styled in accordance with your settings min./min is now standardized.
- ‘sec’, not ‘secs’ is now applied for those journals that prefer ‘sec’ for seconds.
- Heading IDs are now correctly inserted, for those journals that require them.
- Abbreviations are matched more accurately, by looking at the source case of a sentence, heading or title.
- The correct case is now applied in table bodies.
- The rule adding a comma before ‘that’ has been removed, because it was unreliable.
- The rule splitting “incorrectlyconjoined” words has been replaced with a comment, because it was unreliable.
Thank you so much to all the people who gave feedback and helped make this update possible!
Major server update!
18 September 2010
We’ve just updated the Merops server. It’s a major update, with thousands of improvements. You should see a significant improvement in the quality of output documents, and a reduction in errors.
This update is now in place, so you should start seeing these improvements immediately!
Process documents more than 40% faster!*
Our last update was already faster than ever, but this one really takes a leap forward. You should really notice this – it means the average journal article is taking about 1 minute less to process!
*Actual increase is approx. 43%
68 new rules!
Including:
- Automatic generation of heading numbers
- New ‘primary language’ setting significantly improves accuracy in non-English documents, as well as alerting non-primary language words in unexpected contexts
- Automatic identification and mark-up of grants and grant sponsors
- New rule to add spaces before colons, semi-colons, exclamation marks and question marks (used in French-language documents)
- New rules for citation of ‘Article 5’ and ‘Paragraph 5’
- New ‘in footnotes’ context versions of many existing rules
- 15 new individual spelling preferences
Merops knows Italian!
Merops can now process documents in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, as well as using all of these languages in article titles, book chapters, quotes, etc.
100s of rule enhancements!
Including:
- Suggestions for changing name/date citations to numeric reference conversions (and vice versa)
- More automation to give telephone numbers the international style, rather than adding comments.
- New sequence option for book references
- Over 280 more rules have a ‘make author usage consistent’ option
- New options for correspondence and abbreviation lists headings
- New keywords punctuation option
Plus 1000s of other improvements
These include recognition improvements in all areas, correction improvements, new words, terms, names, and spelling errors added, better handling of errors and mismatches, and bug fixes. This has come from our own testing, as well as feedback we’ve received from our users.
Major Merops server hardware upgrade!
4 August 2010
We’ve just completed a major hardware upgrade to our servers. We’ve replaced the old backup server with a mirror server, that even more powerful than the current primary server. This new server can process up to 6 documents at once, bringing the total number of simultaneous processes possible from 5, to 9.
This improvement means that:
- if anyone has experienced queuing recently, that won’t happen anymore;
- if there’s a problem with the primary server, documents will still process at the same speed.
Thanks everyone!
