Congratulations April Advisor of the Month – Prof. Alberto Claro

April 30, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

Muitos Parabéns (Congratulations) to our April Advisor of the Month, Prof. José Alberto Claro, Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil. Alberto is a Professor in Business Administration and recently came to visit the Mendeley office in London during his travels.

(Alberto with Joao Bernardino and Sarah Hoey, at the Mendeley office, April 2015)

Alberto obtained his degree in Social Communication from the Universidade Metodista de São Paulo (Methodist University of São Paulo) and stayed there to earn his Masters in Business Administration, and subsequent research professorship in 2011. At the beginning of 2014, Alberto took up his Adjunct Professorship at Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Federal University of São Paulo, UNIFESP). Alberto’s publications cover a wide range of topics from economics, human resource management, entrepreneurship, scientific writing and tourism.

When asked about his thoughts on Mendeley, Alberto enthusiastically replied:

I am extremely dependent on Mendeley. Its use is intuitive and enjoyable. I have all my theoretical repository stored in it. In addition, over time, my learning curve was much easier to the point of becoming a Mendeley Advisor. I believe that more people would benefit from it.
Thank you, Mendeley.

How did you get into your field and what is your research story?
I do research in the area of Administration and Business, but I work in the Department of Marine Sciences, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. I study the relationships of society, organizations and cities with the sea. I always tried to merge business objectives with the researcher activities. In the last years I have been dedicating myself only to scientific research.

Where do you do your research/work the best? What kind of environment suits you?
I like to do my job in a relaxed, creative environment with people who also have the same interest for science. I try to encourage it to my students and mentees.

How long have you been on Mendeley and what were you using prior to Mendeley? How does Mendeley influence your research?
I already started using Mendeley five years ago. Before, I kept the files in folders on my computer and, indeed, it was very confusing locate them, catalog them, organize them, and then reference them in my research reports or scientific articles.Then Mendeley came and solved all these issues in a way unique. It was love at first use. Today it makes everything faster. The operating part of the registration information is already established, releasing me to the creative part of the research.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor and how are you involved with the program?
I decided to become an advisor because of my ever increasing interest in the tool to the point of using it quite easily. I thought, why not show it to others? Perhaps they will benefit from the features as I do. From then, I asked Mendeley and was accepted. It made me very happy.
Alberto Claro

What academic/researcher/librarian would you like to work with or meet – dead or alive?
I would like to meet Peter Drucker (dead). Great researcher in the area of Administration.
What book are you reading at the moment and why?
I read several books at once, and many, many scientific papers as well. But like books related to scientific research method.

What is the best part about working in research?
The best part of working with scientific research is to see my work recognized by peers after a publication and it being a source of knowledge, or information, to new researchers. It’s rewarding.

And the worst/most challenging?
The most challenging is to overcome the challenges of publication in scientific journals of high impact. Competition is very strong and there are other influences besides the scientific merit, that not one should mention. But the joys are greater still.

What is the one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?
About Mendeley I want people to know that he is fantastic and definitive for a researcher.

Visit the Mendeley Advisor webpage to find out more about our Advisor Program.

An exploratory study of paper sharing in Mendeley’s public groups

April 27, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

Huiqin (head only) Here at Mendeley, we love the efforts our Advisors and users go to, to help us improve. Following on from our March 2015 Advisor of the Month, Hu iqin Gao (Wuhan University, China) writes today’s guest blog post and gives us a summary of her investigation into paper sharing in Mendeley’s public groups.

On the Mendeley website, registered users can create or join groups. If a group is set up as “open” or “invite-only”, instead of “private”, then it is a publicly-visible group. Member and paper lists of a public group is visible to any user, including non-members, who visits it. From the perspective of information accumulation, Mendeley’s public groups become valuable resources as a starting point for seeking people and materials.

So how ‘valuable’ are these groups?
The measurement of evaluating information resources is defined as informetrics in studies of information science. I quantitatively researched Mendeley’s groups in aspect of papers, and used a novel method of informetrics – altmetrics – to measure groups’ literature values.

Data collection was conducted in June 2014 with a Python-coded web crawler. A total of 106,156 public groups were extracted, and 5,034,736 papers (including duplications) from within those groups. Some interesting findings are detailed below.

Sizes and distributions
Almost 2/3 of the groups had only one member. It is common sense that one group has to have at least one member: the creator himself. However,2/3 groups have attracted no other members. The reason for this is unknown, but maybe the creator stopped curating and managing the group after creating it.

The largest group has 1,170 members. Its name was ‘Qualitative Research Methodology’. It is a multi-disciplinary group of ‘Business Administration’ ‘Management Science / Operation Research’ and ‘Social Sciences’. This group may have so many members because qualitative methodology could be applied to many fields of research, so there are a lot of people interested in being a member.

Amazingly, one of Mendeley’s public groups has as many as 90,458 papers. This group, named ‘Vaccine 2’, is under the discipline of ‘Biological Science’. That’s not strange because on Web of Science, biology, chemistry and medicine are the disciplines that have largest number of papers. Since so many publications are produced, they are also rich resources on Mendeley.

Disciplinary differences
I counted the group numbers of each discipline, and the top five are listed below. It’s not unusual to find biology and medicine here, because they have abundant resources of publications. Computer and engineering are disciplines highly involved with the internet, so it’s quite convenient for them to base communications on Mendeley’s groups. Social sciences is a discipline widely intersected with other disciplines, and therefore it has a large user population, and thus accounts for so many groups.

Most valuable groups
In my research, I defined ‘Average Readership (AR)’ to evaluate groups. This value is similar to the ‘Impact Factor’ that is used to measure influences of journals. But in my study, a high AR doesn’t mean high influence. Groups are not the only way people could access a paper, and therefore groups are just accumulations of papers. The higher a group’s AR, the more likely it is a valuable accumulation.

The calculation of groups’ AR value could be used as a dimension of ranking criteria of Mendeley’s search engine. Currently on Mendeley, there seems to be no other ranking rules except text relevance. For group searching on Mendeley, if you can identify highest AR groups by the first glance, you will save lot time scrolling down and jumping among pages before you decide which group to click on.

The full-text, open-access version of Huiqin’s article can be accessed directly here, or indirectly via this IDEALS webpage.

Raise your glass with a Pint of Science!

April 16, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

The Pint of Science is an international science festival taking place annually over three days, simultaneously across the world, to deliver interesting, fun, and relevant talks on the latest science research in an accessible format to the public – all in the pub! Following a launch event this week, tickets are on sale now!

This year, Mendeley are proud and excited to sponsor the Pint of Science Beautiful Mind events, and we are looking forward to this three day celebration of science.

Pint of Science aims to bring the best academic scientists to local pubs and bars so that they can explain their latest research to the public, thus providing a platform which allows people to discuss cutting-edge research with the scientists who carry it out.

This year, Pint of Science will deliver a series of talks cover the topics of:

Beautiful Mind (neurosciences, psychology & psychiatry)
Our Body (human biology & life sciences)
Atoms to Galaxies (chemistry, physics, astronomy & materials)
Planet Earth (earth sciences)
Tech Me Out (technology & computers)
Our Society (law, history & politics)

On the evenings of 18, 19 and 20th May 2015, Pint of Science UK will take place in 12 cities across the UK: Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Exeter, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Southampton, Teesside and York. Tickets for these events have just been released and can be tickets purchased through the above links.

If you spot any of us at an event, come and say hello – we look forward to sharing a pint of science with you.

Elsevier Guide for Authors

April 10, 2015January 5, 2016 stevedennis

Last week, in collaboration with Elsevier’s Guide for Authors team, we quietly rolled out a small, but worthwhile improvement for authors who use Mendeley, and who are submitting to Elsevier journals.

When viewing the ‘Guide for Authors’ page on an Elsevier journal site, the section on how to format your references now contains a link that will install the correct citation style for that journal in Mendeley Desktop, in a single click!

This is available today for 1673 Elsevier Journals. You can see an example on the European Journal of Radiology, or try it for yourself directly: Use APA 6th in Mendeley.

Even for journals where authors are free to use any reference style at submission (and Elsevier will then ensure the correct style is used in the published article), if it is easy enough for authors to use the right style at submission, many authors will just do that. The one click reference style incorporation into Mendeley as described above achieves that ease of use.

Creating these links

While we’ve rolled this out with Elsevier Journals initially, anyone who gets submissions of papers with certain reference style guidelines can create and distribute one-click citation style install links for Mendeley.

Currently, the links only works with styles from the citationstyles.org project (see the repository of styles on GitHub). To create one of these links, you first need a citation style’s unique ID. The style repository contains the list of available citation styles, some are in the main folder, and many are in the ‘dependent’ folder.

Click on the filename of the style you want to link to. The unique ID is the part that is highlighted in blue below.

Simply construct the Mendeley link using the following format:
http://open.mendeley.com/use-citation-style/[unique-id-of-style]

So for the above example, the final link would look like:
http://open.mendeley.com/use-citation-style/clinical-orthopaedics-and-related-research

That’s it 🙂 Test it yourself first to check that it works before distributing the links, but feel free to use these links on your journal or departmental webpages.

Mendeley and Elsevier, 2 years on.

April 7, 2015January 5, 2016 Sarah E Hoey

Dear Mendeley community,

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been two years since Mendeley joined Elsevier. In those two years we’ve seen a lot of exciting developments and improvements. We’ve almost doubled the size of our user base, as well as that of our team, and we continue to grow at an amazing pace (check out our recruitment page to get an idea of what that looks like). Our community has grown to four million users and we now have over 2,600 Mendeley Advisors all over the world. So, I’d say, that’s a pretty good result for the Mendeley and Elsevier teams working to make this a success.

But of course, there’s more: The Newsflo acquisition in January 2015 means that we’ll soon be able to bring our users some exciting new features around measuring the impact and media mentions of their research, and it demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the development of Mendeley as a broad user-focused research platform. The added resources that Elsevier brought to Mendeley also allowed us to develop the long-awaited Mendeley Android App (besides, of course, improving and polishing our already existing iOS App), which is definitely exciting.

We’ve also made a lot of progress integrating products and workflows of Mendeley and Elsevier, working towards making your research workflow more efficient, agile, and simply better. A step further in that direction is that we’ll soon enable selected groups of users to use their original Mendeley accounts with Elsevier products, by integrating these two accounts. If you’re one of those users, this means that your Mendeley username and password will automatically allow you access to products such as Scopus and Elsevier products (if you already have institutional access to those products), as well as ScienceDirect. Over the coming months, we’ll be extending this to the whole Mendeley user base.

The ultimate objective of this is to enable greater access to a wider range of content across both Mendeley and Elsevier. This includes existing products (such as Mendeley, ScienceDirect, Scopus, etc.), but also upcoming products and features (ssshhhh…). In the future, this will also allow Elsevier users to more easily create a Mendeley account. At the same time, you will have full control over your data (see our original promise) and we will continue to support standard and open data formats for import and export.

We’ve put together some FAQs below, but if you have any questions about this – or anything else – you can reach out as usual, either by leaving a comment below or tweeting @mendeley_com.

Thank you
Jan Reichelt
Co-Founder and President of Mendeley

In the next few months, you might be asked to “authenticate your Mendeley account” – what does that mean?
This means that the data you currently use to sign in to Mendeley will be used to create an Elsevier account “in the background” (i.e. no visible change for you). This will ultimately give you more access to content and features, and will help us to provide you with a better experience (not two different accounts, in two different systems, with two different credentials, for something that should effectively be one research workflow). To do this, we ask you to re-enter your password and please accept the Elsevier Terms and Conditions (since we are part of Elsevier).

What will this change mean for me?
Once your Mendeley account has been connected to the newly created Elsevier account, you will be able to use the same username and password that you use for Mendeley, to sign in to other Elsevier products like ScienceDirect and Scopus.

If I already have an Elsevier account, how do I connect my Mendeley account to it?
We will be prompting users to do this over the coming months. It will be a straightforward process of re-entering both your Mendeley password and Elsevier account passwords and consolidating the data held in both accounts.

What other Elsevier products will I be able to log into with my Mendeley username and password?
Currently you’ll be able to log in to ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Engineering Village using your Mendeley username and password. In the future we’ll be looking to expand this functionality to make it easier for users to switch between products, minimizing the amount of time you have to spend authenticating and gain access to various tools and resources.

Can I keep my Mendeley account separate from Elsevier?
In the long term, the answer is no. Mendeley has now been a part of Elsevier for two years, so it would be odd if we didn’t try to bring the products together. All Mendeley accounts will eventually need to be authenticated, and we believe it’s the right thing to do. We always wanted to connect the different products with each other and to integrate different services for our users. We are not making any changes to the way we store or use data about your documents, library or how you collaborate with each other on Mendeley. In the future, this will also make it easier for existing Elsevier users to use Mendeley. Of course, we will allow plenty of time so that you can take this step at a convenient time for you.

Will there be any difference in the way I sign in to Mendeley?
No. You will still use the same username and password to sign in to all Mendeley products, including Desktop, iOS, and the website, as well as any third-party applications that use your Mendeley username and password. From a workflow perspective, nothing changes for you at this point in time. This step allows us to better tie multiple products together, to make it easier for you to switch between products, as well as help us to be more efficient and better in our database management.

Will I be able to access my Mendeley library after I have authenticated my account?
Yes. All of your data, documents and groups will be maintained within Mendeley after your account has been authenticated. This is true for your Mendeley web library, for Mendeley Desktop, and Mendeley’s mobile apps.

Who has access to my data?
Once your account has been authenticated , the data that you used to register and sign in to Mendeley will be made available to other Elsevier products in order to allow you to sign in to these products as well. We are not making any changes to the way we store or use data about your documents, library or how you collaborate with each other on Mendeley products. All of your data will continue to be stored, maintained and used in accordance with the Mendeley Privacy Policy and Elsevier Privacy Policy.

Why do I have to enter my password?
That’s how we ensure that you are the owner of the Mendeley account and agree to connect your Mendeley account to an Elsevier account.

I am having problems with authenticating my account. How can I get help?
Please contact us at support@mendeley.com. Feedback welcome!

Mendeley Blog

Month: April 2015