Month: March 2014

Meet the Mendeley Web Team

Shruti Desai

Continuing our series of introducing each of the Mendeley teams, it’s time to meet the Mendeley Web team.

At it’s most simplest description, the web team is responsible for the Mendeley website–making sure it functions correctly and allows for the networking and groups collaborations that happen online.

But, just as Mendeley is about working collaboratively, the Web team works closely with almost every team at Mendeley, ensuring that important features like the Web Importer, Sync, and Mendeley Discover work correctly. Their overall vision is to use cutting-edge technology to help ease the researcher workflow.

Paul Willoughby

Web Team Lead

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Paul was born and raised in South London, and started developing websites about 15 years ago. Having had various jobs and freelance projects across the whole web development stack, he now focuses mainly on the front-end stuff.

Follow him on Github at  github.com/paulwib

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

As web team lead and senior front-end developer I’m normally up to my neck in meetings, JavaScript or meetings about JavaScript.

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

Working on the next generation of tools for researchers. If I can contribute a little to the vision of the web as an open platform for sharing the worlds knowledge I’ll be very happy. If not, well there’s always the free beer. 🙂

What do you like doing in your free time?

Cooking, reading, rummaging around in junk shops, wondering where I’ve put my keys.

Chris Barr

Senior Web Developer

Chris joined Mendeley in 2012. He graduated with a BSc in Media Technology from Oxford Brookes in 2007. His degree involved a lot of TV programme production, but the exciting challenges were with web development.

Follow him on Twitter @chriswbarr

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

Work on the web team developing the main Mendeley web codebase. Also responsible for web code deployments.

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

I get to work with incredibly intelligent people who are passionate about what they do.

What do you like doing in your free time?

Where to start… I’m an Explorer Scout Leader, so I get to enjoy lots of outdoor activities and camping trips. I love motorsport, photography, cycling, hiking, travelling, hovercraft racing, to name a few!

Mátyás Buczkó

Front End Developer

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Mátyás describes himself as “a passionate developer with the main focus on asynchronous javascript and how to tame it.” Mátyás moved to London in February to be part of the Mendeley team. Previously he worked in Budapest, Berlin and Santa Clara, “but London is by far the best!” he said.

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

I’m involved with all the quirks and wonders of front end development. So if you are using an old version of IE, I will hunt you down!

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

The great team, cutting-edge technologies, challenge and the occasional beer on Fridays of course.

What do you like doing in your free time?

Travelling and dancing salsa make a perfect combination for my free time. There’s also a lot of hanging out with friends, good movies and some accidental programming on the weekends.

Radu Helstern

Back End Developer

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Radu joined Mendeley in March 2014, moving from Sweden in search of a challenge.

He was born and raised in Romania and holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

I have an exciting and challenging role to deliver technical solutions that will help realise Mendeley’s vision for transforming research.

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

Mendeley’s office in London is packed full with very talented, smart, dedicated people. [editor’s note: blush] They create an amazing positive atmosphere which is the perfect ingredient for innovation. Having joined recently, I am really excited to be a part of such an environment and to contribute to the development of a great product.

What do you like doing in your free time?

In my free time, I like to escape reality with the help of a good book (mostly sci-fi or alternative history) or improve my general knowledge about life, universe and everything.

Raúl Jiménez

Back End Developer

After finishing his MSc in Computer Engineering and wandering around Spain in different companies and roles, he decided that was time to see the world abroad, landing surprisingly close to Spain: the occasionally sunny London.

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

As a Backend Engineer, I help develop and improve Mendeley’s web products, but I’m always keen and happy to collaborate with other departments.

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

The people! Either working side-by-side with enthusiastic, motivated and highly-skilled colleagues, or having a beer with them.

What do you like doing in your free time?

Unmentionable geek stuff, British humour, playing sports, cooking, learning useless but interesting things, laying under the sun.

Daniel Kendell

Web Technical Lead

Daniel Kendell

I’m a self-taught developer who has worked on a number of different types of projects at various companies all with very different styles of working. I’ve worked in silos, in large teams and small teams. I’ve built frameworks, web services, internal applications and public facing sites. I think this varied experience has given me a pretty well balanced outlook on the art of software development.

Follow me on twitter at @mduk

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

As the technical lead, my primary responsibilities are to look after the overall architecture of the website, and help to hire the best people we can into the team. I also take an active role in helping to design the new generation of web service APIs that will powering Mendeley as we continue to grow and expand.

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

Working on an interesting project, as part of a hugely multicultural and talented team, right in the heart of London.

What do you like doing in your free time?

In my free time you’ll often find me tinkering with various electronic projects or playing with music hardware. I am a keen Thereminist and this year I’ve also taken up the AXiS harmonic table. Still can’t keep time to save my life, but that doesn’t diminish my enjoyment. What am I, a metronome? I think not!

Mudi Ugbowanko

Senior Web Developer
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Mudi’s full name is Mudiagahn Ugbowanko. Mudiagahn means “Stand Firm” and it’s Nigerian (which he is). Mudi looks at everything from a holistic, logical and empathetic perspective, which he says makes his job easier to manage (pushing keys to solve abstract problems!). When he’s not geeking out, he’s eating and having fun living life: “#WTH seriously, I love food and getting involved with anything the involves social interaction with other people! #getYourMindOutTheGutter!” he said.

Follow me on Twitter @renegare

How do you describe your role at Mendeley?

No-nonsense get the job done, comedic Pro #contradiction?

Favorite part about working at Mendeley?

People are open minded. Projects are ambitious. Opportunities are plenty.

What do you like doing in your free time?

… eating

 

Meet our March Advisor of the Month!

joaobernardinomdly1 Comment

Congratulations and thank you to Othman Talib!Othman Talib

Othman became an Advisor just last month after letting us know about the hundreds of seminars he was teaching all across Malaysia since 2011. How Othman managed to stay under our radar for a long time…we don’t know how, but we are sure glad to know him now!

His talks integrates Mendeley with the academic thesis writing process and he’s developed an entire program of maximizing Mendeley and academic writing, full of interesting acronyms like:

ZDOT (Zero Draft of Thesis);

SROT (Speed Reading On Target);

FBOT (Filter Based On Theme);

OTOT (Operational Template of Thesis);

AFOT( Article’s Framework Of Thesis)

…and so on. If you can’t tell, Othman really loves his acronyms. Have you seen a common theme in his acronyms?  “As you notice my name is OT (Othman Talib) and now I’m OTFM (Official Trainer for Mendeley)!! People and friends call me just “OT” or “Dr. OT” he said.

Othman has written a book about Mendeley in Malay and is now working on its English translation.

How did you get into research and what do you research?

I received a Bachelor in Chemistry, Master in science education (both in Malaysia) and Doctor of Education in Science Education from The University of Adelaide, Australia.

I’m interested in research regarding science animation and now in the process of developing Apps for Organic Reaction Mechanisms.

How long have you been on Mendeley?What were you using prior to Mendeley?

I used EndNote during my studies. Then in 2010, I tried Mendeley because its free!! I was so surprised Mendeley is so easy to learn and then I started to use it in my research. Then I posted the steps of using Mendeley in my blog and now my blog is approaching 1 million reviews!

How does Mendeley influence your research?

Mendeley is a superb Reference Manager. Its easy to use, to learn and such a complete package for managing articles. I combine the use of Mendeley with my own technique, Zero Draft of Thesis (ZDOT), Dropbox, and MS Word, it becomes a complete, efficient and fast way to prepare an academic manuscripts (thesis, proposal, project, report etc)

Why did you decide to become an Advisor?

I just love to share with others in the Mendeley Advisor group.

How have you been spreading the word about Mendeley?

Mendeley Presentation

I’m a lecturer of Research Methodology at Universiti Putra Malaysia. I’m also a consultant for my university as well as a speaker for Malaysian Postgraduates Workshop Series. I’m also an advisor for few government agencies. Most of the institutions invited me because they want to learn Mendeley from me.

I wrote a lot about Mendeley in my blog, as well as in my Facebook. I have thousands of friends in facebook and thousands of followers for my blog. My books such as ZDOT and Mendeley are also sold out and need to be reprinted!!

Feel free to explore my Facebook and blog. You can see the word Mendeley even if you don’t understand the Malay language.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?

I have my own books and my books are the best!! Buku OT

Any fun fact people might be surprised to learn about you?

I not only teach the participants how to use Mendeley, but also how to use it effectively. I have written another book entitled “Research and Thesis: If I had only known” which motivate readers the fact that writing thesis / proposal is far easier with tools such as Mendeley.

What is the best part about being a researcher?

I love to explore. I love to share and teach. I already won 3 gold medals for my animation and got the opportunities to present my research at the  international level.

And the worse?

Nothing….. every single day is waiting to explore !!

What is the one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?

A free brilliant reference manager !

How-to series: Maintain a reading list on your website using Mendeley Groups [part 12 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal2 Comments

One of the great uses of public groups on Mendeley is maintaining a curated set of references about a given topic. This can become really handy for many different reasons. One of which might be the maintenance of a reading list. For this post, we will use the example use-case of a teacher that wants to maintain a reading list for their class.

By creating an invite-only public group on Mendeley, you can put together a list of references along with anyone you invite to the group. So, in our hypothetical teacher story, some potential invitees would be students or teaching assistants.

Ok, so let’s look at how this would work:

    1. Our teacher needs a website where the reading list will be embedded.
    2. Next step would be to create a public invite-only group to store the references they’d like to have listed on the website. This can be done in Mendeley Desktop or Mendeley Web.

create-group-web

3. Once the group is created, the teacher (or an invited member of the group) can add references to the group folder. Simply drag and drop references or PDFs into the group.

4. With the references added to the group, it is now possible to go ahead and get the necessary code to embed the reading list on the class website. The appearance of the embedded code can be customized via a set of option.

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5. Once the HTML code is added to the website, it now dynamically updates whenever the reference list is updates within Mendeley Desktop. No more editing HTML or making changes to the website code.

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By using the embeded code, no further HTML code is required to maintain the website. This means that next year, if the reading list needs updating, it’s simply a matter of adding, removing or updating references in the Mendeley Group.

Here are the previous entries in this twelve part How-to series:

Scopus Now Features Mendeley Readership Stats!

Alice Bonasio

 

Scopus 1

A new feature on Scopus now shows users what the Mendeley readership statistics are for a specific article. The beta version has just gone live last week, and now it’s possible not only to see how many times a paper has been downloaded to a user’s Mendeley library, but also to view a handy breakdown by demographics such as what discipline those researchers belong to, what their academic status is, and their country of origin.

These stats will automatically show up on the Scopus Documents Details pages if at least one Mendeley user has saved the document to their library, together with a link back to the record on Mendeley (if not, then nothing will show up for that document, similar to the way that the Scopus Altmetric.com widget works).

Since 2012, Scopus has shown altmetric.com information, but the added Mendeley demographic breakdown adds another layer to that, giving a much more comprehensive view of an article’s impact, available instantly at a glance.  This means that when trawling through hundreds of abstracts (something that as a PhD student I have to do on a regular basis, so I feel your pain) you can quickly gauge which papers might be most relevant by seeing how many colleagues in your discipline have the document in their Mendeley library.

As well as saving you time, the feature enhances citation metrics because Mendeley readership demonstrates alternative types of academic influence. Research has shown some evidence supporting the fact that Mendeley readership counts correlate to some extent with future citations. On the other hand, the most read article on Mendeley, “How to choose a good scientific problem” (Alon, 2009), with nearly 55 thousand Mendeley readers, only has 5 citations on Scopus. It’s therefore not too unreasonable to think that you’d be in a much better position to make an informed decision about that paper’s impact if given both types of readership stats rather than just the one!

 

Howtochooseagoodscientificproblem

More details are available on the Scopus Blog  and you can also email the Scopus team with your feedback!

Networking by spreading the word

Shruti Desai

Mendeley is pleased to host guest blog posts from our Advisor Community on research life, collaborations, and workflow. Here Jorge Sinval writes about the connections he has made through his work as an Advisor.

By Jorge Sinval

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Mendeley represents a lot in my professional life: it made some important connections possible, and transformed my network. I’m a double degree PhD student in Psychology from the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto, and, Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of Ribeirão Preto of the University of São Paulo.

Mendeley has given me the opportunity to meet several leaders in my field. Here are my favourite collaboration stories:

I first have to thank to my supervisor, Professor João Marôco (ISPA – IU), and to my co-supervisors, Professor Cristina Queirós (FPCE – UP) and Professor Sônia Pasian (FFCLRP – USP). They always support my Mendeley events, and the time I spend on them. Through them, I was able to make some especial contributions to Mendeley, such as faculty lessons.

Mendeley gave me the opportunity to meet Professor Carlos Lopes (ISPA – IU). He helped me improve my events performance, and, with his help, I was able to with develop various Mendeley events in ISPA, including one with the rector, Professor Rui Oliveira and his research team. He also gave me the opportunity to participate in a national meeting for the Higher Education librarians, where I did a Mendeley event. In this event, I met a lot of librarians from all over the country, and many of them helped me find journal articles.

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One of my working projects is a systematic review with metanalysis, for the Cochrane Occupational Safety and Health Review Group. In order to accomplish this work, I need to have access to the maximum amount of databases. With Mendeley, I was able to meet a librarian from the Rectory of the University of Porto, Manuel Montenegro, and with him I could fill the list of the most pertinent databases for my study. He also helped me to design a special workshop for University of Porto librarians that took place in the “Old Collection” room, a space with a lot of history for our University.

Another interesting opportunity that Mendeley created for me was a meeting with a specialist in one of the areas of my interest. I met his PhD student in one of my Mendeley workshops and because I had a folder with the name “Job Insecurity”, she was able to connect me to her co-supervisor, who was visiting Portugal.

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Through these connections, I was able to request the loan of a three volume book, from the only copy of the handbook in my country. It is like a Bible in my area of research, and it deserves the weight of carrying it.

My most recent event was at the ISCTE – IUL in Lisbon, where my brother, João Sinval, studies. I talked to the librarian Teresa Segurado, and the session occurred, it was one of the largest sessions I have given, as well as the most heterogenic, from graduate student to the pro-rector, Professor Susana Carvalhosa.

Mendeley continues to enrich my network. Before I started at my new University, I was already able to get to know a librarian from my institute, Solange Santana, before I even arrived! With this, all that I have to say is… Thank you Mendeley… For changing my way of doing research =)

Interested in writing a guest blog about your research life? Email Shruti Desai shruti.desai@mendeley.com.

 

Bringing Papers to the Bench

Alice Bonasio

 

 

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Many Mendeley users will already be familiar with Labfolder, the digital lab notebook that lets you organize your protocols and data. The good news is that all this functionality is now being integrated into Mendeley to bring scientific literature closer to the lab. This is why we invest so much on our open API, so that 3rd Party developers can integrate even more functionality right into the Mendeley platform. Here’s Florian Hauer to tell us how that works for Labfolder:

If you work in experimental sciences – biology, medicine, chemistry, physics or any other discipline where you do experiments in the lab – there are several reasons why you read scientific literature. The primary motivation might be to learn what other people did that relates to your research – and how they did it. Second, you want to know which papers describe the basis for your experiments, and you want to cite them correctly. Third, you would like to share useful papers with your colleagues.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your scientific library right in your lab notebook, where you can search, read and cite all your papers of interest? We thought it would be – and that´s why we integrated Mendeley into Labfolder.

Like Mendeley, Labfolder is a free tool to make research easier, more organised, and more collaborative. Labfolder is a digital lab notebook which allows you to collect all primary research data on a digital platform instead of a paper notebook. With mobile apps for smart phones and tablets, you can collect data and take notes anywhere, and reusable and shareable protocol templates and group functions help you to exchange knowledge and speed up your research.

With this integration, we have made another step towards bringing scientific data from different sources closer together. With the Mendeley extension in Labfolder, you can:

  • Cite any publication from your Mendeley library directly in your experimental descriptions to track which literature you need to cite in your final paper
  • Download, integrate and view any paper from your Mendeley library in your protocol description to quickly look up details right in the experimental workflow
  • Upload your Labfolder experiments to Mendeley to attach them to publications and share them with colleagues.

Watch the video to see how it works

labfolder Mendeley integration from labfolder on Vimeo.

With the integration into Mendeley, it has become a lot easier to link experimental descriptions to scientific publications. Very often, the technical details of how a scientific discovery was achieved is heavily edited and compressed, making it very hard for researchers to extract the necessary information. Linking experimental descriptions and publications, and sharing these links as well as the detailed content will help enormously to bridge this gap.

With its recommendation engine, Mendeley offers a powerful tool to identify interesting content. It provides helpful navigation in the endless sea of data and content – for publications as well as for experimental descriptions – and helps researchers to find the data they need. Thus, Mendeley is an ideal platform for sharing experimental details: You can reach an interested audience and get credit for your research. To protect privacy, however, all Labfolder uploads are private by default and marked in Mendeley as ‘unpublished work’ so nothing will be shared until you are ready for it to be.

Sharing of scientific data is becoming more and more attractive: Apart from the fact that US researchers get credit for shared data in publications, studies have shown that scientists who share their data get cited more often.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Labfolder brought to you by Mendeley! If you have more great ideas about how to improve the use of scientific literature in Labfolder – or Labfolder itself – get in touch and let us know!

 

Mendeley Desktop 1.11 Released

Robert Knight1 Comment

Mendeley Desktop 1.11 has been released. The major new feature in this release are the new Contents and Enrichments tabs in the right-hand pane which provide an easier way to get an overview of a paper and dive into the relevant section of it. For an introduction to this, see our previous blog post. There are also a number of bug fixes for legal and working paper citations, handling of internal links in the PDF viewer and more.

One additional new feature in this release is a facility to opt-in to notifications of preview releases of Mendeley Desktop. New features and bug fixes for Mendeley first appear in our ‘development preview’ releases before we roll them out to a wider audience. Until now, you had to download preview releases manually from the downloads page. As of Mendeley Desktop 1.11, there is now an option to get notifications of new preview releases automatically from within the app and install them with a couple of clicks.

 

A note about Preview Releases

Please note that preview releases are not final and will have had less testing than our stable releases. If you’re not comfortable using beta software or you have an urgent deadline coming up, stick to the stable release.

Getting Preview Releases

Mendeley Desktop 1.11 now provides an option to opt-in to experimental preview releases of Mendeley. We’re rolling MD 1.11 out gradually to existing users, so if you’ve not got it yet, just go to Help -> Check for Updates.

To enable notifications of preview releases in 1.11 and later, go to Help -> Check for Updates -> Opt-in to Experimental Releases. Mendeley will then check for new preview releases whenever it is started and offer to install them. You will always have the option of whether or not to install a new preview release and you can opt-out of preview releases at any time via the Help -> Check for Updates menu.

Mendeley Desktop preview opt-in

Feedback

Please note that we can’t offer the same level of support for previews as we do for our stable releases, but we would like to hear about any bugs you encounter or thoughts on new features or changes via our support forum

More Tips and Updates

For more tips on using Mendeley, updates about releases and other news follow our Twitter accounts (@MendeleyTips, @MendeleySupport). If you’d like to vote on feature requests, please visit our uservoice forum.

 

Getting connected with other researchers on Mendeley is getting easier!

Alice Bonasio

As of this week, with a single click, you will be able to follow other researchers on Mendeley to stay on top of what they are doing and see what they are publishing. You will see activities relating to researchers you follow on your Mendeley web dashboard. Similarly, your own publications will reach a much wider audience as others follow you.

Follower

This is going to replace the current contact-based model, where you had to accept contact requests explicitly.

But wait, what about privacy?

We take that very seriously of course, so it’s important to say that with this change, we are not making publicly visible anything that was not public before. For example, no other users will see what you are reading in your library. In addition, based on feedback, we also decided to introduce the protected profile option, which lets you control who can follow you. Like on Twitter, your default option will be open, but you can also easily modify this by going into your privacy settings so that only approved users can follow you.

As you know, Mendeley is not only about the tools that help you format your citations, organize your documents, and generally manage your research workflow. That’s all really good, of course, and rest assured we’re not about to drop the ball on that side of things, but what makes Mendeley different is the fact that we’re also a social platform where researchers from all over the world can collaborate.

We’re excited about this feature because it’s another step in making Mendeley even more social, and it means that it will now be easier for our users to find, get in touch and collaborate with others who share their research interests. We believe in making science more open and collaborative, and anything that brings members of our research community together has to be a good thing. We hope you enjoy connecting with other researchers on Mendeley and really want to hear what you think of this change, so please get in touch!

Free access to Science Direct for early career researchers

Shruti Desai1 Comment

Research is not always a linear path, especially in a market squeezed by shrinking grant availability, changing job paths, and fewer permanent career positions.

Compounding the issue for early career researchers between positions is the lack of access to resources like current and archived research.

Elsevier is seeking to alleviate the pressures for between-jobs researchers by continuing a program to help early career researchers who are between positions stay up-to-date on their respective fields. The Postdoc Free Access Program grants complimentary access to books and journals on ScienceDirect for up to six months.

More details from Elsevier:

Post-Doc Free Access Programme: Back by popular demand.

Stay current in your field–even in an uncertain job market

In November 2012 and again in June 2013 we launched a programme to support young scholars in between jobs or looking for their first postdoctoral position. Applicants who qualified were granted up to 6 months free access to all our journals and books on ScienceDirect and able to use this access to work on grant applications and research project.

We were delighted with the response we got from the community; both from post-doctoral organisations who forwarded the application form link and from researchers who qualified for the free access.

One of the recipients of the 2012 program, Daniele Vergara of the University of Salento in Italy, wrote: “As a postdoc fellow in biological sciences, this program [gave] me the chance to maintain a vital scientific network, to read papers and write grants. In the absence of help from government and local institutions, the Elsevier program was a great experience, an innovative way to support postdocs during their research career.”

As the international economic situation continues to be challenging for scientists starting their career, we have decided to bring back this program. In order to give even more people the option to apply we have extended the application period to 7 months.

How to get the Free Access Passport

To qualify, candidates must complete a form verifying their credentials by September 30, 2014. Once approved, they will receive a personal code allowing access to ScienceDirect.

Qualifying criteria are:

  • Postdoctoral researchers who have received their PhD within in the past five years.

  • Candidates must have completed the last research position (either PhD research or a postdoc or equivalent) on or after January 1, 2014, or have a position that will end before October 1, 2014.

Applicants should submit a scanned image of a letter from their last academic mentor or advisor that states the position held and the date on which the position ended or will end. For more on the program and an application, visit elsevier.com/postdocfreeaccess

If you take part in this program, or did last year, share your stories with us! We would love to hear from you.