We have been very busy at Mendeley looking at how to improve the Developer Experience for the community that builds cool stuff on the Mendeley API.

For those who don’t know, API stands for Application Programming Interface and it’s what allows your product to talk to other products, opening up your data and functionality to outside developers.

So far we have well over 100 active clients developing with the Mendeley API, which is not too shabby. These include Android and Kindle clients like Scholarley and KinSync, Altmetric, which tracks what people are saying about papers online, and Labfolder, an app that helps researchers organise their protocols and data.

We want developers to make A LOT more apps for Mendeley though, so we listened to feedback and put together a new and much improved API and sleek Developer Portal, where we’re now collating a whole bunch of tools and resources to support our developer community.

We also have a growing API Team at Mendeley including Joyce Stack, who’s dedicated to Developer Outreach. If you’re wondering what exactly that is, here’s some first-hand insight on what her job is like. Just don’t call her an Evangelist, she hates that…

The latest step in this journey was to release an SDK (That’s Software Development Kit to you and me) to make things simpler for Android developers wanting to work with Mendeley. An early public access version is now available on GitHub which provides model objects and packages and takes care of authentication.

We’ll of course be looking to improve the API  because, as any good geek knows, no code is ever finished and we know there’s a long way to go! With that in mind please send us your feedback. You can email api@mendeley.com and reach out to @mendeleyAPI on Twitter.

For  all the latest news on the API and Developer Tools, also be sure to follow the Mendeley API Blog