Month: January 2009

Member Location Map

Mendeley

Here at Mendeley the web team have been so busy improving the website and adding new features that we forgot to tell you about them! Just before Christmas we added a new member location map which shows you where all of our members are located around the world (or at least those that have entered their location information).

map

You can click on any of the markers to see how many Mendeley members are at that location. A quick look at the map shows that the majority of our current users are based in the US and Europe. If you haven’t entered your location details on your profile page yet make sure you do so that you get counted on the map! Here are the current numbers for a few big cities:

  • London: 21 members
  • Berlin: 10 members
  • New York: 7 members
  • Paris: 5 members
  • Madrid: 3 members

map-london

You also have the option to see who the members at a selected location are. If you take a look at London you’ll see most the of the Mendeley staff!

map-london-people

We’ve got lots of new features and general improvements on the way that should be with you soon, including improved profile search, online library updates, and article pages. We’ll be sure to let you know about them when they’re ready, but in the mean time you can check out the map page.

Mendeley 0.6.2 Released!

Mendeley1 Comment

Just over a month after the release of Mendeley Desktop 0.6.1 we’ve got another release ready for you! In this release we’ve made the desktop client much more stable and addressed a number of bugs that were present in 0.6.1. This should make the whole Mendeley experience more pleasurable!

It isn’t just the desktop client that has been updated. The website also includes a number of changes, including improved statistics, a new invite feature and a number of layout changes.

The main desktop client changes include:

  • Added an invite link to the main menu – if you find Mendeley useful, please help us to spread the word
  • Added automated back-ups before doing a complete re-sync
  • Added an “Ungrouped” document group which shows all documents that have not been added to any group
  • The list of document groups is now sorted alphabetically
  • Some minor metadata extraction improvements. arXiv papers are now handled better
  • Introduced support for a wider range of DOIs
  • Bibtex export preserves the contents of the Notes field
  • After downloading a file attached to a document by clicking on the grey/green PDF icon, the downloaded file is now kept locally so that it does not need to be re-downloaded
  • Auto-completion is now available in the metadata edit dialog

As always we appreciate your feedback, so please do let us know if you have any problems or suggestions for improvement.

Call for Papers: 5th International Conference on e-Social Science

victorhenning

Well, I’m stuck at the Toronto Airport because I missed my connecting flight to Raleigh, NC. At least I found an AC outlet for my laptop – now I’ve settled down on the floor with a splendid view overlooking… the toilet entrance. Thank you, Air Canada.

On a more positive note: I’ve been invited to join the Programme Committee of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science! Yeay! It will take place from 24-26 June 2009 in Cologne, Germany. The conference is organized and chaired by the NCeSS, which recently won the Research Information Network tender on the “Web 2.0 resources for researchers” project.

Here’s the Call for Papers for the conference – please note that the submission deadline (29 January) is approaching fast!

5th International Conference on E-Social Science http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=10498546&access_key=key-2hh747kbungkaszlxv3d&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

Explaining the elements in a series of amazing videos

victorhenning

I just came across this, and it’s brilliant. Not least because our name, Mendeley, was partly taken from the discoverer of the periodic table. A team of chemists from the University of Nottingham set out to explain every single element in a brief, but very informative and funny, video: The Periodic Table of Videos.

periodic-table-of-videos

The Hydrogen video, for example, largely consists of a guy named Pete blowing up balloons, and a frizzy-haired scientist explaining the reaction. My favourite moment comes at the end:

Frizzy-haired scientist: Deuterium gas, in all its properties, will be very similar to hydrogen. Of course it is denser, because it has a neutron as well as a proton, but it’s still much lighter than air. So, a deuterium balloon will still float up to the ceiling and make Pete look just as stupid as the hydrogen one.

Camera guy: But I was thinking more about fusing it, now that sounds like a really big explosion we could do at the back!

Frizzy-haired scientist: No, fusion reactors are way beyond what Pete can do. Unless he’s a lot cleverer than I think.

Here’s the video, but I encourage you to check out the entire website:

P.S. The guy who blows things up is Pete Licence, a lecturer in chemistry and chemical engineering, and the frizzy-haired scientist is Martyn Poliakoff, CBE, a research professor at the University of Nottingham.

Via total.pardo.

How to properly cite Alien Mind Transmissions

victorhenning2 Comments

Our friend Vivek just shared this with me via Twitter: Newest Rulings on Alternative Source Citing. Might be old news, but it’s still kinda cute. Here’s an excerpt:

Alien Mind Transmissions

When citing telepathic transmissions from alien planets/spacecraft:

  1. Name the aliens who sent the message (if known).
  2. Identify the location of planet or craft.
  3. Identify the location where transmission was received.
  4. List the date the transmission was received.

Example: “Internal combustion vehicles are wasteful and evil. You must stand in the street and curse their drivers and occupants immediately.” [The Elders of Antares 7; A Ship Orbiting Saturn; Corner of Lawrence Avenue and Broadway, Chicago, IL: July 5,1989.]

It also has Rest-Stop Restroom Graffiti, Magic 8-Balls, Tattoos, and Epithets Hollered Out Car Windows.

Our experience with the RIN Tender "Web 2.0 resources for researchers"

victorhenning1 Comment

Happy New Year from everyone at Team Mendeley! We’re excited to be back from the holidays and buzzing with ideas. We’ve got a couple of newsworthy bits, but that’s for another post.

This one is about a research proposal we submitted in December, trying to get selected by the Research Information Network for a commissioned study on the “Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers” (Mendeley, anyone?). It was a joint effort with Gavin Baker/SPARC, Jonathan Gray/Open Knowledge Foundation, Niall Haslam/European Molecular Biology Lab, Liz Lyon/UKOLN and Cameron Neylon/Science and Technology Facilities Council. As the lone social scientist on the team, my main task would have been to oversee the empirical survey and conduct the statistical analysis and structural equation modelling.

Unfortunately for us, even though we were invited into the final round of presentations at RIN, our bid did not get selected. I can understand (and agree with) the reasoning that RIN gave us – they thought we had a great team and compelling methodology, but we hadn’t given as much thought to the nuts and bolts of the project management as they would have liked. Nonetheless, it was a great learning experience (Gavin has blogged about this, too), and I genuinely enjoyed working out the proposal with the other team members. Getting into the final round wasn’t too shabby either, considering that none of us had ever written a proposal for such a research tender.

Sincere congratulations to the winning team from NCeSS/University of Manchester and ISSTI/University of Edinburgh!

In the spirit of Web 2.0 collaboration and sharing, our team had planned to make our proposal (and had we been selected, our ongoing work and raw data) public for everyone to access and re-use. So here’s the proposal we submitted:

Tender: Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers http://documents.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=9402283&access_key=key-2nshgydkyl0eng7q5aby&page=1&version=1&viewMode=