As you probably know that, whenever you add a document to your Mendeley library, the document details for that entry are aggregated into our Mendeley databases so as to allow you to easily synchronize your library across multiple platforms. These aggregated data are also used to generate our extensive and multidisciplinary research catalog that is continually growing, fueled by the ongoing uploading of references to your (and everyone else’) library.

This is all good and well but how about documents you don’t want to include in the catalog, or you don’t think are actually useful for others to have access via the research catalog? For those cases, we have a checkbox in the Document Details panel that allows you to keep that entry from being aggregated. It will still be synchronized across your multiple devices, but it will not have the Document Details aggregated to our research catalog.
There are plenty of situations where this can be useful. Notes from a class that you are storing and don’t believe are useful for others, manuscripts you are currently working on and therefore are still incomplete, etc.

In summary, if you’re adding a document and you don’t want the document details to be anonymously aggregated and made available for search in our research catalog, then go ahead and click on the “Unpublished work” checkbox in the Document Details panel on the right.

There you go, simple stuff once again. In our next entry we’ll be touching on the topic of annotations.

Here are the previous six entries in our How-to series:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
• How to check for duplicate entries and merging
• How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!)
• How to add supplementary data to references

There’s a great discussion that’s been going on over the past couple weeks on the LIBLICENSE-L mailing list. I particularly liked what one of the participants, Jan Velterop (CEO, Acqknowledge) had to say, so I asked him if he would like to contribute a guest post and he graciously agreed: (more…)

It isn’t to obtain tenure. And it isn’t for money. Although to some, that is what publishing has become. The rationale for why we publish is (should be) to communicate results to as great an audience as possible and advance our understanding of the world around us. At Mendeley, we started to wonder how we could help communicate results and bring new models to the publication ecosystem. We think that Open Access content, where the full-text is readily accessible to all, will be the standard communication model in the future. And as such, we are rethinking how we shape our discovery algorithms. (more…)

We held another Mendeley Open Office on Friday, November 26, 2010. Trying something new, we are now doing talks. And as promised, here is the talk I gave on increasing the visibility of your research. I’ve added speech bubbles to the slides to give some of them more context in case you were not here to listen to it live. I also added a little more information that wasn’t on a few of the slides on the actual evening. This was a Friday evening talk, with dozens of people happily enjoying beverages and mingling, so needed to be kept short.

One thing that is important to point out is that improving your career means marketing it, just like you would take a grant writing course to improve your odds of funding. Some people might look down on this; they’ll be the first to be left behind in a world where finding the needle in a haystack of millions of research articles is more and more dependent upon academic search engines such as Mendeley, Google Scholar, or PubMed. This is becoming known as ‘Academic SEO’ and is a variant of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. And just like regular SEO, there are expected methods you should be doing to get your content indexed. There are of course things that you shouldn’t do, and that’s where we need to start drawing the line and is a discussion for another time.

If you are having trouble reading some of the text, then click on the menu and ‘View Fullscreen’ option.

Jason Hoyt is Chief Scientist & VP of R&D at Mendeley. Where, among other projects, he oversees the indexing of content and the search/recommendation engines. Follow him on twitter @jasonHoyt

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

2. Castro Neto et al, ‘The electronic properties of graphene’, Reviews of Modern Physics (2009), Volume: 81, Issue: 1

3. Erez Lieberman-Aiden et al, ‘Comprehensive mapping of long-range interactions reveals folding principles of the human genome’, Science (2009), Volume: 326, Issue: 5950

4. Ed Bullmore & Olaf Sporns, ‘Complex brain networks: graph theoretical analysis of structural and functional systems’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2009), Volume: 10, Issue: 3

5. Zhong Wang, Mark Gerstein, Michael Snyder, ‘RNA-Seq: a revolutionary tool for transcriptomics’, Nature Reviews Genetics (2009), Volume: 10, Issue: 1

6. Development Core Team, ‘R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing’, R Foundation for Statistical Computing (2009) Volume: 2, Issue: 09/18/2009

7. Fatih Ozsolak et al, ‘Direct RNA sequencing’, Nature, Volume: 461, Issue: 7265

8. Benjamin M Bolker et al, ‘Generalized linear mixed models: a practical guide for ecology and evolution’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2009), Volume: 24, Issue: 3

9. Michael Schmidt & Hod Lipson, ‘Distilling free-form natural laws from experimental data’, Science (2009), Volume: 324, Issue: 592

10. Stephen J Eglen, ‘A quick guide to teaching R programming to computational biology students’, PLoS Computational Biology (2009), Volume: 5, Issue: 8

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!