As the year gets to the end, everyone writes “Best of” lists for the past year. I thought I would do something similar, but since we’re at the end of not only a year, but a decade, it’s worthwhile to reflect on the changes in how people manage and organize their increasingly digital stores of information. Over the next week, I’ll highlight some major developments and discuss how they’ve informed the development of Mendeley. This week it’s the practice of tagging bits of information as opposed to filing things in a hierarchical folder structure, with posts on the move to querying databases of information as opposed to loading information from individual files and the representation of information as a temporal stream as opposed to a static page to come next week. (more…)
Archive for the ‘academic features’ Category
Most of our users know that Mendeley can format citations automatically in most word processors. Some may not realize, however, that this bit of magic wasn’t developed entirely by us. Rather, we use tools that were created by a global community of academics and released for everyone to use. I recently had a conversation with the initiator of this movement, Bruce D’Arcus, on where the project is going, what it means to research, and how you can take part. (more…)
This week’s update to Mendeley Web has a some search enhancements that should make it a little easier to find things on Mendeley Web. The main addition is search for groups. Now that we have over 50,000 groups created by people sharing research on a topic with their colleagues, publishing curated lists, or just having a bit of fun, finding groups by invitation or through your contacts’ profiles isn’t quite enough. (more…)
Last week we uploaded a development preview of Mendeley Desktop, which isn’t as stable as the proper release but allows adventurous users to try out the latest features. You can download it from the bottom half of: http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/. And please, restart Mendeley Desktop after installing as the Word plugin doesn’t work when run from the installer (we will fix this!)
It includes a cool new citation feature for the Word plugin which makes adding and removing references much simpler. Eventually we will get it working on OpenOffice and on Mac Word, but first we’d like you Windows users to let us know how it works for you. Here’s the low down: (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:
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At Mendeley, we’re continually impressed by the uses people find for our service, so we occasionally showcase some of these stories that demonstrate why Mendeley is such a powerful tool.
In this post, meet Professor Griffin along with Ashlinn Quinn and a team from Columbia University who are involved with the Global Honors College and learn how Mendeley works for them.
Ashlinn Quinn
Professor Griffin
The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) focuses on enhancing education with the purposeful use of new media and technology. The Center provides support for a number of Columbia University online platforms, such as its wikis, blogging, and course management systems and also develops custom educational projects including online simulations, case studies, training sites, and more. During the past year, a team at CCNMTL researched and curated a suite of tools to be used in the Global Honors Seminar, an annual, summer-long intensive course hosted by Waseda University in Tokyo in which faculty and students across nine universities spend three months researching, debating, and documenting a specific area of research. The first part of the course, which began in June, is conducted entirely online, and then students meet for a final on-site phase where they continue their work in person.
CCNMTL set out to find a way for over 50 students and faculty to track and share their research. They were specifically seeking a tool that would allow students to seamlessly build a shared bibliography of annotated references on a range of topics covered throughout the seminar, and they found Mendeley’s social bibliography tool to be a great fit.
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Having seen a lot of ‘top 10 lists of 2009’ around, we thought we’d throw in our two cents and give you the top 10 most read articles on Mendeley, published in 2009!
The top paper for 2009 was written by Uri Alon, entitled: ‘How to choose a good scientific problem’, published in the journal “Molecular Cell.” Our stats tell us that there are currently 74 Mendeley users who have read this paper, even though it was only published in late 2009.
The full list of the top ten articles published in 2009 on Mendeley (as of 28th January 2010) is:
1. Uri Alon, ‘How to choose a good scientific problem’, Molecular Cell (2009), Volume: 35, Issue: 6
7. Fatih Ozsolak et al, ‘Direct RNA sequencing’, Nature, Volume: 461, Issue: 7265
We’d like to point out that this isn’t an authoritative list of all the ‘most read articles for 2009’. Instead, these are the ones that appear in Mendeley user libraries and show some early indications of the popularity of a journal article. We will also track the evolution of these stats over the course of 2010.
Readership complementing the impact factor
With Mendeley’s growing user base, the readership count can complement other measures, such as citation metrics, adding an extra dimension to assessing a journal article’s impact.
For example, the article “How to choose a good scientific problem” is a general interest article, rather than being specific to biology which suggests it is not likely to have a high citation count in future primary research literature.
Nonetheless, it is already the most read paper on Mendeley published in 2009, a factor that would otherwise be missed. This indicates that the readership count can allude to other ways in which articles are used within a community, and therefore increase awareness of what should be read. The next step will be to anonymously track reading time and quality rating metrics to gather the most accurate data possible for our upcoming personalized recommendation engine.
Predicting research trends?
Understanding and predicting research trends is an important part of research. The citation count, used for decades as the gold standard in article-level metrics, can verify broad trends occurring within academic disciplines such as biology. While quite accurate, official citation metrics take two years to calculate. In contrast, readership statistics may be able to predict similar trends in real-time.
For example, look at The Scientist’s list of the hottest biology papers in 2009 (all published in 2007). The readership count for these papers on Mendeley correlates with ISI’s citation count at r=.76 (two-tailed, p=.13 due to the low sample size) – a near perfect correlation, even if only based on five papers and our userbase of just over 100,000 users:
Comparison of Mendeley’s most read papers with the ISI Citations
We look forward to comparing the top 10 list shown above to the official ISI citation metrics for 2009 publications when they are calculated and released later in 2010 or 2011.
In summary, using Mendeley’s readership figures alongside the citation metrics should make it possible in the future to evaluate the scope of a journal article within the community more effectively. Finally, further refinements and understanding of readership metrics might make it possible to identify the next big trend in the academic world.
Methodology
The top 10 list was made by noting how many times a paper appears in the libraries of individual Mendeley users (readership count) and how many distinct user tags were attributed to that paper (tag count), then we filtered the results to include only papers from 2009 – done!
We are very happy to announce that CAT.INIST, one of Europe’s largest scientific research catalogs, has added Mendeley’s ‘easy import button’ to its article pages. CAT INIST joins the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and ArXiv.org who have also added Mendeley’s import button to their article pages.
CNRS, “Centre National del la Recherche Scientifique” (the French National Research Institute), provides research articles and information for scientists and academics Europe-wide. The cooperation now allows users to quickly import articles to their Mendeley online library.
“CAT.INIST (established in 1973) hosts a collection of 15 million bibliographic records, held in the CNRS in Paris. The catalog provides research articles in the fields of Science, Technology, Medicine, Humanities and the Social Sciences.”
Additionally, by installing Mendeley’s Web Importer into your browser, you can easily import articles from many other databases as well, such as Google Scholar, PubMed, IEEE, ISI Web of Knowledge, etc. For a complete list of supported websites, have a look at http://www.mendeley.com/import.
For more information on CNRS’ catalog visit http://cat.inist.fr.
Upload Space
When we first cleared out some room on our servers to allow you to upload PDFs to your private Mendeley Web account, we spared 500 MB per person, given that PDFs are usually around 1-2 MB, this enables you to store 250-500 PDF documents online. In response to requests (or should we say popular demand?) as well as bulging research collections, we will increase the storage space as part of a premium package in early 2010 (we are also working on more detailed stats, a recommendation engine and some other nice features).
For the growing number of people who really can’t wait that long (hats off to those of you who have already maxed out your accounts!), please write to support@mendeley.com with a request for extra space and we’ll be happy to pass out some freebies. It will be a temporary upgrade but you won’t have to switch to a premium subscription later. Once the premium features are in place and if you choose not to upgrade, you won’t be able to add any further documents to your web account (if it is larger than 500 MB), but your data will still be accessible and safe.
Shared Collections
Taking a similar approach with shared collections – which are currently limited to ten people – we quickly found requests rolling in for collections of a much larger size, mainly for departments and labs. So, we will raise the number of people who can access a shared collection as part of a premium package and in turn make the limits flexible. Again, write to support@mendeley.com if you need more shared collection slots within your department, lab, or research group. Send us your username (e-mail address), the name of the collection, and the number of people you would like to collaborate with and we can expand your shared collection to make it a bit more sociable for the festive season.
(Image by CwThomas43)
