One of the most interesting things about creating software that’s used by millions of people is seeing how the ways people use your software agree with what you expected and also the unexpected ways that people use it. One somewhat unexpected thing we’ve realized is that there are (at least!) two distinct modes of use of Mendeley.

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Meet Jane. Jane uses Mendeley as a cloud research storage application. Jane is a graduate student who works mostly on her own and has created and participated in a few public groups. She uses groups mostly for the purpose of discovery of new and interesting research, but also to share what she’s found with others in her field, so public groups are best for her. She keeps her papers in Mendeley so that she can access them easily from wherever she is, on her Desktop PC or Linux machine at work, or her Mac laptop at home, which allows her to work on her manuscripts wherever she is. She sees Mendeley as an application which stores her reading history for easy retrieval and she appreciates the Mendeley Suggests feature to help her discover new research. Jane is a real research hound, needing to store over a thousand papers, and appreciates being able to buy extra storage. Most Mendeley users are like Jane, with or without the need for extra storage. (more…)

Mendeley blog via DOM Visualizer

This week’s update could be the start of something big. At Mendeley, we know that as you read, annotate, share, and organize research documents, your knowledge and expertise is encoded in your collection. Decisions such as what groups a paper belongs in, what tags are meaningful for a paper, and whether or not you’ve read the paper through to the end are all important signals about how important a given paper is and how it’s related to others. Our mission at Mendeley is to help you leverage this latent information to more effectively organize, share, and discover research. Today, we’ve taken an important step in this process by using tags to group related documents and groups together, and we’ve also added a wiki-like page for each tag to describe the concept the tag represents and to link to related concepts. Intrigued? (more…)

Tip 1: Give yourself a professional face with a Mendeley Web profile.

A brief sampling of researchers who actively use Mendeley shows the amazing effect that a complete profile can have. Among researchers who have publications listed on their profile, those with a picture and educational or work experience listed have twice as many readers of their papers, their profiles are viewed 4 times as often, and they tend to have 4 times as many contacts. With this kind of impact, isn’t it worth taking 5 minutes to add or update your profile? Just click the link to your profile and select the edit tab to get started. (more…)

Today brings a major new update for Mendeley Web as well as a new Development Preview of Mendeley Desktop. Here’s a short list of some of the improvements: (more…)

This post is the third post in a series of posts designed to introduce you to the new information organization, discovery, and retrieval concepts in Mendeley. In part 1 we discussed tags and filters and in part 2 we discussed the idea of search as an interface to your research. Today I’d like to talk a little about another feature that has become common to information organization and discovery tools – the activity feed.

The benefits of online research are obvious (more…)

Privacy settings can be difficult to understand. We really want to make sure that everyone can easily control what aspects of their Mendeley activity are visible and to whom. Towards that end, we have added more granular privacy settings where you can specify what parts of your profile should be visible to each of three categories: Everyone, My Contacts, Only Me. Shown are the settings you can now choose and below I’ve described how they work. (more…)

This Wednesday saw a mostly behind-the-scenes update, but there are a few things that are very useful: embeddable groups, web download links for private groups, and raised API limits for app developers. (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…)