Thank you for participating in our Social Media Week event held at Google New York yesterday. Our panel session addressed scholarly communications and we are thrilled to have hosted it. SMW organizing committee and Google team – you are awesome! (more…)
Mendeley is now settled in our new office space in New York. We are hosting an Office Warming & Open Science Event this Friday November 19th from 6-9pm. We want to invite neighbors and colleagues – if you are interested in Mendeley and the future of open science we welcome you to join.
The evening will be a chance to share ideas, connect with others and get to know the Mendeley team better. Jan, our Co-Founder, will briefly talk about Mendeley’s journey and give an update on what we hope to achieve. The New York team will also introduce themselves along with good food, tasty drinks and fun activities.
Looking forward to meeting you!
We would like to invite you to an exciting event:
Mendeley Talks on November 26th 2010 in Central London
Here’s your chance to listen to Jason Hoyt, R&D and Chief Scientist at Mendeley, talk about how you can get your research noticed:
Getting your research noticed on Mendeley, Google, and everywhere else
Ah! So you’ve finally gotten that manuscript through two rounds of revisions and it’s been published! Or perhaps you haven’t published yet, but you’re considering doing a pre-print. So, what are the best practices in getting that post-print noticed? Or how do you ensure that a pre-print will do its job, but not prevent you from getting a peer-reviewed version as well? Come to find out and also learn how Mendeley ranks your papers in its search catalog and recommendation engine. We’ll also discuss whether boundaries should exist in the extent to which one should promote their research.
Afterwards, you will get the chance to have some fantastic Feuerzangenbowle and chat with Mendeley’s CEO Victor Henning. Otherwise, you can grab a beer and try to beat CTO Paul Föckler at Foosball.
Of course, this event is completely free, and you are welcome to bring along interested colleagues and friends.
The agenda:
6:30 Drinks and Snacks
7:00 “Getting your research noticed on Mendeley, Google, and everywhere else”, Jason Hoyt
7:30 Open Discussion
7:45 Feuerzangenbowle and Snacks with Foosball and insight to Mendeley
8:30 Official end
November 26th 2010, 6:30 – 8:30pm
144a Clerkenwell Road
White Bear Yard, Ground Floor
London, EC1R 5DF
To RSVP please get back to events@mendeley.com.
With best wishes, and great anticipation,
The Mendeley Team
<New York at Night by British photographer Jason Hawkes>
We’ve made our way to the other side of the pond. We’re a small, talented team of six hard at work! Our NY team is ready to reach out to those who still suffer from the pains of managing their references. We’re also reaching out to those who have not yet seen the light.
First, we want to help researchers be more productive. What’s more, we’re really here to support their collaboration. We want to pair bright minds with similar research interests and help them spend less time searching for papers. Our goal is to empower the discovery of new works on today’s hottest research topics.
…and our beloved University Advisors. For those who missed the news, we recently launched a community outreach program for our strongest supporters. They are integral to what Mendeley is building and give us valuable, critical feedback. Team NY is here to dedicate more energy to working closely with our Advisors.
With Team London as our guide, we look forward to hosting something like Open Office Friday in our new digs once we’re settled. So get pumped for jam sessions or pizza parties or dart night or [fill in your wish]!
Here we are, posing pretty, with our Mendeley poster.
From Left: Lauren Johnson, Jan Reichelt, Jessica Mezei, Jonathan Keidan, Miji Choi,
Andrew Bennie (who just joined us today) and the Liaisons-at-large William Gunn in Southern California and Ricardo Vidal in Toronto.
William Gunn
Ricardo Vidal
Pressure, the good kind, is continuing to build up. We are being named, listed, and watched.
Just a month ago, Mendeley was named as the start-up most likely to change the world for the better at The Guardian Activate 2010 Summit. What better encouragement could there be, we thought. We jumped up and down, patted each other on the back, took a deep breath, then went back to work so that we can live up to the prediction.
Today, UK-based Telegraph released another list, Top 10 European Technology Companies of 2010, compiled by PROfounders Capital’s Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of Lastminute.com, and Rogan Angelini-Hurll, who formerly headed the Citi Pan European Media Research team.
Mendeley is listed as no. 5. That’s one step up from being ranked 6th in the Guardian/TechMediaInvest 2009 list of Top 100 Tech Companies.
Stepping up to the plate one rank at a time… Go Team!
And you, Mendeley users and followers of our blog, Go You Too! Pressure us and keep us on our toes. Use Mendeley until you are no longer satisfied. Let us know what excites or frustrates you – and give us a shout at Mendeley Feedback Forum.
We believe that we will change the world for the better. Yup, this exciting and glorious ambition is what keeps us going. But we also realize that we are not the only one sweating to make it happen. That’s exactly why it is such an honor to have placed first at the Guardian Activate Future Technologies Pitching Contest.
A panel of judges including Esther Dyson, Anil Hansjee, Stephen King, and George Coelho asked themselves, “which company is most likely to change the world for the better?” and the answer was Mendeley! Also today, Victor – alongside Google CEO Eric Schmidt and US Deputy Chief Technology Officer & Director of White House Open Government Initiative Beth Simone Noveck – gave a presentation at the Guardian Activate 2010 Summit.
Thank you everyone for supporting us (and yes, keep sending us your feedback)! Being recognized feels great and what we love even more is that a win like this allows us more opportunities to speak up about our progress and vision.
Speaking of progress, we reached just over 400,000 users and are approaching 30M research papers in our users’ libraries as of yesterday.
Now let the saga continue…
Academia-bound information management tools are not a new thing. But never have they been as widely or excitedly welcomed. Odd, it seems, for an industry ripe for collaboration. The enthusiasm is, in large part, due to Mendeley’s ease of use – but its longevity lies in the long-tail data that can be unearthed about who’s reading what, when and why.
- “Mendeley ‘most likely to change the world for the better’” by Josh Halliday, The Guardian
Are you working for a company or institution in the field of science, or do you want to reach the thought leaders in science online? We are looking for sponsorship partners for our Science Online London 2010 conference on 3-4 September (Fri/Sat) at the British Library in St Pancras, London. Last year, our sponsors included institutions and companies like the Royal Institution of Great Britain, CrossRef, NESTA, AAAS/Science, and BioData.
As a sponsor, you will gain exposure to key scientific bloggers, communicators and thought leaders. Given the nature of the audience, we anticipate plenty of media coverage and ‘buzz’ through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and blogs. The conference is a golden opportunity to demonstrate that your company is a supporter of such tools for scientific communication, and a chance to promote your brands, products and services to an audience of passionate communicators.
If you would like to participate as a sponsor of Science Online London 2010 please contact Lou Woodley (l.woodley@nature.com).
Co-hosted by:
We’re delighted to announce a brilliant addition to Team Mendeley – Ian Mulvany! At Nature Publishing Group, Ian was the product manager responsible for both Connotea (Nature’s social bookmarking service) and Nature Network (an academic social network/blogging platform). We had bumped into Ian at various events and conferences, and each time, we were excited and inspired by his thoughts about the future of scientific collaboration, communication, and publishing. It got to the point that we simply couldn’t resist trying to get him on our team – and I’m extremely happy to say we succeeded: Next Monday, Ian will become our VP of New Product Development! Hell yes.
So, over to Ian:
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At the heart of the academic literature are conversations about how we understand the world. The content and context of what researchers in the academy do is fundamentally important in constructing what it is to be human. The advent of a deeply interconnected world, and the growth of academic output has, unsurprisingly, led to a situation where it becomes difficult to get a clear understanding, or even a clear picture, of the diversity of what we know about the world. Though advances in communication have led us to this place of over-saturation, tools that help us manage and work our way through all of the information available to us have been slow to emerge.
Mendeley has made real progress in creating tools that can help researchers both manage, and make sense of what is going on in the literature. When I was approached by Jan, Victor and Paul I was impressed by what they had achieved so far, and even more impressed by what their future plans are. They have assembled an amazing team, and I see a great opportunity to work with them to make a positive impact on the daily life of people working with academic literature.
In my career to date I have worked for scientific publishers, first at Springer, and then at Nature Publishing Group. I’ve been fortunate to work closely with communities of scientists, to work with great people in the publishing industry, and to help build some pretty interesting things. A consideration, though, has often been on trying to understand how these tools can fit within the framework of existing publishing business models.
By moving to a start-up company, focussed on just doing one thing, and doing it really well, I see a chance to work on rapidly producing tools that innovate not only in what they offer, but also in the business models that support them. Those are some of the reasons (did I mention the amazing team already?) that I’m absolutely delighted that I will be joining Mendeley full time from Monday the the 28th of June.
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!
Great news! We’ve been picked by Chinwag and the UKTI to don our cowboy boots and Stetson hat before jetting off to the great Lone Star State on a Digital Mission.
“39 of the UK’s leading digital companies have been selected for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. [...] The successful companies were chosen from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, journalists and industry pundits to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi.”
(You can find the full list of participating companies here.)
There are some great presentations in the line-up at SXSWi, some of the ones we’ll be looking out for include: Can the Real-Time Web be Realized?; Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change and Is The Brain The Ultimate Computer Interface?
We also hope to swot up on doing business in the US (not by watching re-runs of Dallas) but attending some special events and seminars set up for tech entrepreneurs. SXSWi brings together some of the brightest minds in the tech world and a line up of special programs showcasing websites, video games and start-up ideas. If you are planning to attend, let us know and we’ll be happy to hook up.
A big thanks to Digital Mission for making it possible and we’re looking forward to a great event!
