Changing how research is done is a very big task, and we can’t do it alone. We’re particularly appreciative of our development partners who are working with us to chip away at the problems hindering research efficiency today. One problem is sifting through the volume of search results to find the most important and timely results. Jason Priem of Total Impact is working on this problem at the School for Information Science at the University of North Carolina. He and his colleagues are doing a study to determine if scholarly search can be improved by personalizing search results based on the previous reading history of the scholar — that’s where you come in. If you’re willing to share your academic search and paper reading history to improve science, sign up for his study!
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This weekend saw dozens of hackers converge on the Mendeley offices in New York and London for a weekend of fun, games, and changing how research is done. Hack4Knowledge arose from internal Mendeley hackdays, where our developers are released from the tyranny of Trac tickets and given free rein to build whatever crazy idea comes to mind. Some of our best ideas have come out of these events, so it only made sense to open our doors and invite in the broader developer community. On Saturday the 11th, the offices in London and New York were opened; food, beer, and entertainment were secured; and a few dozen hackers sat down for a weekend of code and camaraderie. There were 10 teams that presented their work at the end of the weekend. Some of the projects are live and linked so you can check them out, for the others I’ve included screenshots or links to the code repository.
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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…)

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 post is the second in a series, looking back over the changes in information management over the past decade. Three major and interrelated developments are the move to querying databases of information as opposed to loading information from individual files, the practice of tagging bits of information as opposed to filing things in a hierarchical folder structure, and the representation of information as a temporal stream as opposed to a static page. This post is about the move to databases from filing systems, and how that improves your workflow. (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)