This document discusses Mendeley and its role in providing altmetrics and broader definitions of research impact. It describes how Mendeley collects metadata on researchers and documents, including reads, shares, annotations and more to provide recommendations and measure non-traditional impacts. It addresses issues like privacy and attribution but argues altmetrics can show a more complete picture of impact than citations alone by capturing readership sooner and from a wider audience.

1. How Mendeley illuminates a
broader definition of impact
William Gunn, Ph.D.
Head of Academic Outreach
Mendeley
@mrgunn
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3555-2054

2. ...and aggregates research
data in the cloud
Install
Mendeley Desktop
Mendeley extracts
research data…
Collecting rich signals
from domain experts.

3. Cloud Library
Home Work Mobile

4. Shared Folder

5. Read papers + keep track of notes
470M documents

6. Taking some misery out of writing

7. Mendeley Research Catalog

8. Mendeley Research Catalog

9. New forms of discovery
• Mendeley Suggest
– personalized recommendations based on
reading history
• related articles
– relatedness based on document similarity
• recommender frameworks
– implement recommendations as a service
• third-party recommender services
– serve niche audiences

10. Information Extraction

11. We are publishing this data to the LOD cloud
http://code-research.eu/

12. Connecting researchers
Search
Read
Annotate
Organize
Import
Write

13. Data we collect
• Metadata about the paper
–title, author, tags, annotations,
reads, shares, groups
• Metadata about the researcher
–discipline, educational status,
country, papers they’ve authored,
presentations, expertise

14. 2.7M researchers

15. Defining readership
• Each document addition is a
“read”
• stamped with metadata
describing the context of the read
event
• a read is like a citation, but faster
and captures more

16. research impacts more than authors
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

17. Problems with Impact Factor

18. The higher the impact factor, the more
likely the research is to be retracted.
http://iai.asm.org/cgi/reprint/IAI.05661-11v1?view=long&pmid=21825063

19. Problems with Impact Factor
During discussions with Thomson
Scientific over which article types
in PLoS Medicine the company
deems as “citable,” it became clear
that the process of determining a
journal's impact factor is
unscientific and arbitrary.”
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291

20. Citations are slow

21. Mendeley is fast

24. Readership vs. citations
• it comes with a payload of
metadata
• it accrues faster
• it illuminates previously
hidden impact

25. http://arxiv.org/html/1203.4745v1
altmetrics show broader impact

26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3789/isqv25no2.2013.04

27. altmetrics show broader impact
http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-13/AprMay13_Lin_Fenner.html

28. Issues To Be Addressed
• Identity
• Privacy
• Attribution
• Gaming
• Filtration
standards/
best practice

29. There is no gold standard
 Amgen: 47 of 53 “landmark” oncology publications could
not be reproduced
 Bayer: 43 of 67 oncology & cardiovascular projects were
based on contradictory results
 Dr. John Ioannidis: 432 publications purporting sex
differences in hypertension, multiple sclerosis, or lung
cancer. Only one data set was reproducible

30. Cultural skew is important
South America is weak on N.A. social media, strong on Mendeley

31. What would people build if they
could get the data?
• Impact Story – get credit for all your work
• PLOS ALM – article-level metrics for
papers
• Plum Analytics – bespoke analytics for
libraries (EBSCO)
• Altmetric.com – altmetrics for publishers.
(Digital Science)

32. www.mendeley.com
william.gunn@mendeley.com
@mrgunn