This is the second of four parts announcing the top 40-ish Apps entered into the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. To see the first batch of ten apps, check out Day One. Check back tomorrow for the next batch of 10 apps.

As a reminder, the top 10 apps will be announced in two weeks and the overall winners will be announced November 30th

Now, in order of entry received date, the second batch of 10 out of 40 apps to benefit science:

The Paper Link

A browser plugin and mobile friendly, use this to find and get PDF links “without additional clicks” and then save them to your Mendeley library.

Collabgraph

Visualizes who is collaborating in your field of research. Just connect with your Mendeley library or upload a bibtex file, containing your literature references and Collabgraph will create a fancy graph showing who is publishing with whom.

ScienceCard

This web-based application automatically collects all publications of an author, and calculates article-level metrics (citations, number of bookmarks, number of PDF downloads) for all of them. Metrics are available as html, json, xml and csv. ScienceCard is Open Source software based on the PLoS Article Level Metrics API Server, but significantly enhances the code by adding author-level metrics, additional sources (including Mendeley and Microsoft Academic Search), OAuth authentication and a web-based user interface.

openSNP

The vision is to enable everybody to perform crowd-sourced genome wide association studies to create new knowledge about our genes. openSNP allows customers of direct-to-customer genetic tests (e.g. 23andMe or deCODEme) to publish their test results, find others with similar genetic variations, learn more about their results, find the latest primary literature on their variations and help scientists to find new associations. The application is open source, the code can be found at https://github.com/gedankenstuecke/snpr.

MedMenCA

Medmenca (MEDLINE/Mendeley Current Awareness) is a new service that takes MEDLINE and Mendeley, and mashes them together into a pile of “gooey goodness.” In short, is shows citations relating to your Mendeley Libary using PubMed/NLM’s E-Utilities API. It also attempts to “profile” your papers to better understand the authors and topics that are of interest to you.

Vyzkumap

I have no clue how to pronounce this one (maybe “Viz-coo-map?”), but it has some of the better visualization graphics that I’ve seen in some time (Most citation maps are a serious eye sore). Perhaps it’s the dark background that helps, or that it reminds me of the song and dance intro to every James Bond film. It’s a tool for browsing related research using Mendeley in a visually appealing manner. And very cool that the source code is freely available over on GitHub.

MapMyField

Another app by the maker of Vyzkumap above, this is a website that displays Mendeley users across “the lovely human home world!” I can’t wait to see the the alien home world version. Looks cool though, so check it out.

Science Stack

Science Stack is about getting to the documents on PloS and Mendeley through fast methods. The website provides a core search engine that combines the results of the two APIs. The developer also created plugins for Firefox and Chrome, with an open search for IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari top browser search bar. Future plans include extending Science Stack by providing search features onto Android and Playbook mobile platforms.

PLoS Impact Explorer

The tag line here is “Why wait for citations? See which articles in your field are getting the most buzz online…” It’s part of Altmetric.com, a web service that aggregates article mentions from across the web – from social media like blogs, Twitter and Reddit to newspapers, STM magazines and special interest groups and forums. You pass it a DOI or similar identifier and it gives you back a measure of the attention that object has received since publication. It uses the Mendeley API to track the number of researchers who have bookmarked an article.

The PLoS Impact Explorer was built for the Binary Battle and mashes up data from Altmetric with the PLoS search API. Searching the Impact Explorer will return any matching papers from PLoS that have been mentioned somewhere on the web.

Citebot

Citebot is an Android app that retrieves full text and PDF of research articles published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. The PLoS API is used for data retrieval.

OK. That’s it for the second batch of 10! Check back tomorrow to see the next ten apps to make it into the Binary Battle.

Jason Hoyt is Chief Scientist & VP of R&D at Mendeley. Follow him on twitter @jasonHoyt