Upload to Mendeley: charting new social territory for researchers and academics

Since its launch Mendeley users have uploaded more than 280 million documents between them

It’s almost too easy to picture the traditional academic as a lone figure, dwarfed by mounds of books and journals, emerging occasionally to give a talk on their research to similar dusty dons. Times are changing, and Dr Mendeley Victor Henning, cofounder of the online academic database, is among those at the vanguard of a digital revolution for the modern researcher.

Since its launch in 2009, mendeley.comhas gathered a user base of two million who have, to date, uploaded more than 280 million documents between them. It began as a software tool for organising papers from scholarly journals but has become a platform for connecting like-minded researchers and helping academics discover new papers. This is one of the many technology services, including Altmetric, Academica.eduand Zotero, that are enabling university researchers to go digital and get social.

The idea for Mendeley was hatched after Henning and his cofounders, Jan Reichelt and Paul Föckler, got tired of managing the unwieldy collection of documents on their computer hard drives, a problem that is familiar to so many frustrated master’s and PhD students.

“We all had the same problem of organising hundreds of documents and we thought, Why isn’t there a [better] way of doing this? Obviously you have iTunes or WinAmp for organising your music collection so why not have similar software for academic literature?”

The software began by pulling relevant data from documents – the title, author, keywords – in order to keep track of the collection and automatically turn a collection of PDFs into a structured database. It soon turned into a social-networking platform revolving around the sharing of academic literature.

“From the beginning it was about visualising and helping people discover research,” says Henning, “such as finding out how the different fields of science relate to each other; were people reading the same sort of thing?

“That’s when we stumbled on the social part: if we can get hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of scientists to use that tool, we can crowd-source all of the information that they put into the tool to build a big, open academic database that people can use to discover research but also discover research trends.”

The idea, he says, is quite similar to the music recommendation site last.fm, essentially "scrobbling" (the term Last-fm gives to the publishing of its users' music-listening habits) research data instead of songs and extracting trends and statistics about what people around the world are searching and reading. Technology entrepreneur and former chairman of last.fmStefan Glänzer spotted the similarity. He became Mendeley's founding investor and executive chairman.

Next step

While the focus of Mendeley has primarily been to improve the productivity of researchers by taking the labour out of document search and organisation, Henning and co are keen to move it forward: “We’re starting to integrate recommendation technology based on the rich data we now have. The first application of that was doing recommendations for research papers. Based on your existing library it tells you what other research papers you should be reading.”

The next step involves connecting people as well as documents. It will help researchers discover groups on Mendeley doing similar work to them and use that to connect people with other academics they might want to collaborate with.

Drawing on data from its significant global user base, the London-based tech start-up recently released its Global Research Report, which gives some insight into who is using the online tool and how. Currently the largest user base, at 31 per cent, is from the biological sciences and medicine; the second largest discipline (16 per cent) is the physical sciences and maths.

Among the two million users, the statistics for adoption of the online space as a place to research is encouraging. The average Mendeley user has curated a research collection of 142.8 documents and spends on average one hour and 12 minutes per day on the site, presumably searching through articles, organising or reading them.

A conference held in London earlier this week, SpotOn (Science Policy, Outreach and Tools Online) 2012 reflected a similar appetite among the scientists and researchers present to embrace the online space. There was a recognition of the need to measure research outputs on the web as the traditional academic journal gives way slowly to open-access journals, many often published in digital format only. If an academic's work is being shared on Facebook or tweeted about, this can be measured as a valid research impact, says Euan Adie, founder of altmetric.com.

Henning agrees. Even before he started Mendeley he had a vision that with the data generated it would be possible to carry out real-time trend analysis and build alternative metrics to the traditional Impact Factor.

“Citation data is the gold standard, but studies have shown that a lot of papers that people cite aren’t actually being read. They are cited because everyone in their field cites it.”

Meanwhile many papers are read but go uncited, and their influence is not captured by traditional measures. This is where platforms like Mendeley can glean insight into the secret life of academics. Every click, “like”, tweet, emailed weblink and download can be measured and can perhaps build a clearer picture of how research is carried out, collaboration happens and innovations come about.