progress update

Mendeley Web Update – discipline pages, activity notifications, and more.

drgunn5 Comments

There’s been a lot of work under-the-hood at Mendeley Web lately, so it makes me happy to finally be able to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on. Some of you may have already noticed the new notifications lightbulb in the upper right of the page when you’re logged into Mendeley. When there’s activity in your groups, the bulb will light up. You can also control how you get notifications by email in your Mendeley Web account settings.

notifications

In the Mendeley Web catalog, there have been some big changes. The Papers tab has been redesigned to make it easier to find what you’re looking for, either using the new search interface or by browsing one of our 25 research categories, covering everything from Architecture to Zoology. The browsability of the catalog has gotten much better too, with the creation of discipline summary pages which show popular papers, people, tags, and groups for a particular discipline. We’ve also done the same for tag pages, which are a great way to drill deeper into a subject.

Here’s an example of a tag page:

The tag page features two new things that really set our catalog apart. First, note the cool tag trend graph, an output of one of our first internal hackdays. If anyone has any insight into why there was a dip in the occurrence of the word feminism in right after 1999, I’d be interested to hear it. Next, check out the text above the graph. Many pages in our catalog have discipline descriptions added, but this one doesn’t. If you think you can write a great description of feminism as an academic area of study, click the link and contribute! These description boxes appear on every discipline, subdiscipline, and tag page in our catalog. Even cooler, you can create links between disciplines and tags to show how fields of study are connected.

Those are the major updates, but as usual we have a laundry list of fixes and improvements, such as:

  • A new jobs page with updated positions available.
  • Updated teaching materials
  • Stay on the page you were on after logging in
  • Better error handling via OAPI
  • Profile information available via user-specific API call
  • Show number of papers on discipline & tag pages
  • Create documents via OAPI
  • updated comparison chart

…and many more bug fixes and improvements. There’s also a new preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.0, featuring two of the top 5 most requested features of all time – nested folders and duplicate detection! Get it from the dev preview page and please let us know if you have any comments.

5 thoughts on “Mendeley Web Update – discipline pages, activity notifications, and more.”

  1. I still don’t see ECOLOGY. I mean, it’s not an obscure, unknown area of science, it’s on the news everyday, it’s one of the main subjects on ISI. Why don’t you guys follow ISI web of science classification of journals by subject? It’s quite straightforward and will work perfectly with my Mendeley database! 🙂

  2. Still no word on if/when a paper can get automatically tagged based on the conference or journal it appears in? I can almost guarantee that few people tag a paper at an AI conference with the AI tag :p.

  3. Christian – They won’t, I’m sure, but if they’re Mendeley members and have AI listed as their subdiscipline on their profile, the papers will end up under that category anyways. See http://www.mendeley.com/computer-and-information-science/artificial-intelligence/ Most often we have keywords supplied by the author in addition to user supplied tags, and that helps too. Long-term plans include a more robust classifier, but I can’t give a timeline for those features.

    Daniel – We have Ecology as a subdiscipline of Envioronmental Sciences. If that’s wrong, how about writing a description of Ecology explaining why?

  4. The tag usage graph would be better with a vertical axis saying what it represents and with numbers :).

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