Mendeley's Data and
Perspectives on Data
Challenges
Kris Jack, PhD
Chief Data Scientist
https://twitter.com/_krisjack

Overview
➔
What's Mendeley?
➔
Why Run Challenges?
➔
Mendeley's Challenges
➔
Conclusions

What's Mendeley?

➔
Mendeley is a platform that connects
researchers, research data and apps
Mendeley Open API
➔
How are we building our community?

Mendeley provides tools to help users...
...organise
their research
➔
Reference
management
➔
Cite-as-you-
write
➔
Full-text
article search
➔
Digitalised
annotations

Mendeley provides tools to help users...
...collaborate with
one another
...organise
their research
➔
Professional
research groups
➔
Social network
➔
Annotation
sharing

Mendeley provides tools to help users...
...collaborate with
one another
...organise ...discover new
their research research
➔
Personalised article
recommendations
➔
Related research
➔
Research contact
suggestions

Our community from a data perspective
Social network Personal libraries
(~2M users) (~300M articles)
Research groups Research catalogue
(~175K groups) (~50M unique articles)

Why Run
Challenges?

Why Run Challenges?
➔
An important part of our mission is to make science more open

Why Run Challenges?
➔
An important part of our mission is to make science more open
“All the time we are very
conscious of the huge challenges
that human society has now –
curing cancer, understanding
the brain for Alzheimer‘s [...].

Why Run Challenges?
➔
An important part of our mission is to make science more open
“All the time we are very
conscious of the huge challenges
that human society has now –
curing cancer, understanding
the brain for Alzheimer‘s [...].
But a lot of the state of knowledge
of the human race is sitting in the
scientists’ computers, and is
currently not shared […] We need
to get it unlocked so we can tackle
those huge problems.“

Why Run Challenges?
➔
An important part of our mission is to make science more open
“All the time we are very
conscious of the huge challenges
that human society has now –
curing cancer, understanding
the brain for Alzheimer‘s [...].
But a lot of the state of knowledge
of the human race is sitting in the
➔
We run challenges that scientists’ computers, and is
aim to open up science currently not shared […] We need
to get it unlocked so we can tackle
➔
Your skills in information those huge problems.“
sciences are valuable to us

Mendeley's
Challenges

PloS/Mendeley's Binary Battle
Challenge: Build an application with our data,
make science more open.
Results:
More details at http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle/

ScienceRec Challenge 2012
Challenge: Build off-line system for scientific
recommendations with our API
and DataTEL data set
Results: Will discuss today
How to improve for the future?
50K users, with at least
20 articles each
More details at http://2012.recsyschallenge.com/tracks/sciencerec/

Conclusions

Conclusions
➔
Mendeley makes tools that help researchers to:
➔
organise their research
➔
collaborate with one another
➔
discover new research
➔
We are crowdsourcing a wealth of research data
➔
We're opening it up to the world
➔
And inviting you to participate

We're Hiring!
➔
Data Scientist
➔
apply recommender technologies to Mendeley's data
➔
work on improving the quality of Mendeley's research catalogue
➔
starting in first quarter of 2013
➔
6 month secondment in KNOW Center, TU Graz, Austria as part of the EC FP7
TEAM project (http://team-project.tugraz.at/)
➔
http://www.mendeley.com/careers/

www.mendeley.com

A Challenge for the Future?
Challenge: Investigate how well algorithms
perform in real-world settings
Motivation: Industry repeatedly finds that
aggressive A/B testing is required
because offline improvements do
not necessarily translate to online
improvements
Problem: Academia tends not to have access
to large online communities Research groups
(~175K groups)
Solution: Industry runs A/B test with
academic algorithms and reports
results
What about privacy?
Use publicly available data
Anonymise and aggregate results reported