Congratulations and thank you to Yoilán Fimia León!

Yoilán, who is involved with higher education, often teaches Mendeley at his institute, Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas, in Cuba. Recently, he designed a one-credit academic course on Mendeley and reference management, which already has full classes this fall.

“My university noted that in one national evaluation that the Ministry of Higher Education conduct every year over the students one of the variables measured is “the use of reference managers” and it was found that this was the variable with the lower grades during the last 4 years,” Yoilán said. “In that sense, future actions will be taken relating the use of Mendeley at UCLV and probably future training programs for students will be raised.”

How long have you been on Mendeley?

I don’t know exactly but based on my oldest reference in my library on Mendeley I have been there since February 28th, 2010.

What were you using prior to Mendeley?

I used Endnote previously to Mendeley

How does Mendeley influence your research?

I think my research history can be divided in two phases (after and before Mendeley). The organization I have of all my research literature with more than 5,000 references could be only optimally managed thanks to Mendeley. In my point of view, the opportunity Mendeley gives me to get in contact with researches around the world working on similar fields is one of the more valued features and it has influence my results.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor?

Good things that can make the difference always attract many people. I fell in love the first time I saw Mendeley working so why not let the people know?

How have you been spreading the word about Mendeley?

I started introducing Mendeley to the people working in my department of Educational Technology at UCLV. Later on I suggested my students to used Mendeley to organize their references, to insert citations in documents, and to automatically generate bibliographies. After many informal sessions, more than 250 students know about the Mendeley’s existence and benefits. I did the arrangements to include Mendeley in one course named “Bibliographic management” for students in my university. I also included the subject related to the use of Mendeley in public document writing for a special programme named “Public Administration” oriented to people in public administration jobs. This programme have a module of ICT in public administration and Mendeley was one of the tools showed in this course. Afterwards, I organized several formal and informal Mendeley workshops and training sessions to show its benefits to researchers, librarians, and university managers. Finally, I have designed an official postgraduate training programme for my university. The new programme seems to have good acceptance and many request have been registered.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?

At this moment I´m reading some books about statistics due to my PhD, but I found that the library in my university have one copy of the first edition of “El Quijote” and I would like to read it again from this very old copy.

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

I’m teaching my 6 year old son how to use Mendeley to record and organize his drawings and first texts.

What is the best part about being a researcher?

I think the best part about being a researcher is the inquiry spirit and the ability to share the results and be the pillar for further research and findings.

And the worst?

The time you lose to be with your lovely people because you are researching.

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

I think that people in front and behind Mendeley are very nice and have developed an incredible sharing spirit. This spirit has been transmitted to the network of user using the tool.
Now that Elsevier is the owner of the product I´m really sure they will continue encouraging and supporting this spirit in order to get something really valuable for our society.

Anything Else?

I would thanks to “Centro de Documentación e Información Científico-Técnica” (CDICT – UCLV) and to the Network Project between VLIR and Five Cuban Universities. Special thanks to Maggie Fimia for all her support.