Category: mendeley use case

Expanding impact: The Mendeley Webinar Series

Shruti Desai

The lone cowboy researcher motif has ridden off into the sunset. With research becoming more and more collaborative and multi-disciplinary, the support networking surrounding researchers is ever-expanding in size and importance. Librarians and institutional support can be especially key; researchers need to have access to the best tools to help them be even more efficient and effective.

Learn how Mendeley can help researchers, librarians, and institutions drive research success with our webinar series, launching this week. This series of four free webinars explores the premium features for users and advanced analytics for librarians being used by institutions across the world.

Want to know what’s happening next for Mendeley? The series kicks-off with Jan Reichelt, Mendeley co-founder and President of Mendeley, who will share the Mendeley roadmap for the next few years.

Schedule and registration information:

Thursday 26 June 2014 17:00-17:50 hrs. CEST

jan

“One year after joining Elsevier – The even better Mendeley!”

Join Jan Reichelt, Mendeley co-founder and President of Mendeley, discusses becoming part of Elsevier, his vision for the future, and how Mendeley continues to “change the way we do research.” Jan will also review the upcoming Mendeley roadmap for rest of 2014 as well as what new innovations to expect from the Mendeley and Elsevier team in 2015. [Register for this webinar]

 

 

Tuesday 1 July 2014 16:00-16:50 hrs. CEST

jensdamm“Vision of Technical University of Denmark’s use of Mendeley to drive research and scientific collaboration”

Technical University of Denmark, or DTU, is one of the foremost technical universities in Europe and continues to excel with increasing number of publications and extensive global industry partnerships each year. To build on its vision of research and technical excellence DTU rolled out Mendeley to all of the university and participation grew by 250% in less than 6 months. In this session, presenter Jens Damm Fledelius, Head of Projects at DTU, will talk about the vision of the university library, the progress of the Mendeley project, early signs of success, and the future steps forward. [Register for this webinar]

 

 

 

Thursday 17 July 2014 11:00-11:50 hrs. CEST

“The library’s role in supporting research impact at Hong Kong Baptist University and Eurofound”

christopherchan chloeleiLearn about how Mendeley supports research results and collaboration from two different institutions. Hong Kong Baptist University, a publicly-funded institution focused on providing the best whole person education for its students and European Foundation, will share about their teaching and research focus and why reference management tools are an essential part of the education process from librarians Christopher Chan and Chloe Lei.

vandammeThe European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working conditions (Eurofound) is a tripartite European Union Agency, whose role is to provide knowledge in the area of social and work-related policies will discuss how Mendeley is crucial to sharing and dissemination of new scientific trends and information. Jan Vandamme of the Eurofound Information Centre, will give insights to how these institutions came to learn about Mendeley, their evaluation process, building a business case for internal support, planning of user deployment, the results so far, and their plans for the future. [Register for this webinar]

 

 

 

Thursday 17 July 2014 11:00-11:50 hrs. CEST

Mendeley @ Stanford University

helenJosephineHear about how the library team at Stanford University selected Mendeley, an evolutionary reference management tool connected to one of largest academic social networks, to deploy to researchers and faculty. In one year, more than a thousand researchers have joined the Mendeley group @ Stanford to support both research collaboration and individual research projects. Librarian Helen Josephine teams up with Jessica Rylan, PhD Student, and Gennifer Smith, Master’s Student, to give an overview of how the library took on the initiative and how the students and researchers have embraced the new researcher’s tool to support their work. [Register for this webinar]

If you attend, let us know what you think of the webinar in the comments below!

Teaching teachers to use Mendeley to teach

Shruti Desai

Mendeley recently partnered with The Midwest Scholars Conference, held in March at Indiana Wesleyan University. The goal of the conference is to provide a collaborative environment where professors and teachers can share their Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research and classroom experiences.

Advisor Chris Devers used his teaching skills to demonstrate Mendeley as a tool for fellow professors and teachers:

Chris Devers
Chris Devers

Recently, Mendeley sponsored the Midwest Scholars Conference. At the conference, I provided a seminar that demonstrated some of Mendeley’s advanced features. During the seminar, participants described how they used Mendeley in their research process and asked how I use Mendeley in my research. They were thrilled to learn that I use it in all my projects and that I provide frequent seminars on Mendeley that are streamed live and recorded for later viewing.

All the participants at the seminar were actively using Mendeley but wanted to learn more about Mendeley’s advanced features. For example, some participants wanted to learn more about groups and how to collaborate with colleagues, and were pleased to learn that Mendeley could rename files by author, date, etc.

In addition to showing the attendees how the group feature worked and facilitated collaboration, I also demonstrated how I use the group feature in my own research and collaborate with others. Specifically, when I am working on a project with colleagues or students, everyone involved uses Mendeley to share, annotate, and organize relevant literature. All of our notes, highlights, and comments are shared across the group, as well as when we add articles. It also provides a place for us to discuss the literature — all of our research is in one location and not spread-out over multiple documents, email, etc.

For example, one of our projects explores note-taking and learning, and a student who works with me, Christine Lee (Ph.D. student at UCLA), uploaded an article from Psychological Science comparing pen note-taking versus computer note-taking. If we had used email to share the article, we both would have had to enter the information separately, which would not be as efficient as using Mendeley.

Mendeley is not simply a reference manager, but rather it helps us facilitate and manage our research projects, and provides us with new recommendations as we build the literature base for the project.

 

 

The Brooke: Creating a true academic social network

Shruti Desai
Polly Compston at The Brooke
(Polly Compston works in Kenya with Haroon from Afghanistan and Manish from India)

Earlier this year, we had the chance to meet with Polly Compston and members of The Brooke and do some collaborative training. The Brooke is an animal welfare organization, dedicated to improving working conditions for horses, donkeys, mules and their owners, in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Brooke both does practical on-the-ground programs and training in countries, and also supports animal welfare through funding and producing research on subjects like equine health and community development.

As such, they have a global network of researchers, some with more limited access to resources to others. Polly tells the story of using Mendeley to further The Brooke’s mission:

I spent two weeks this past February in Kenya, working alongside a truly international group of vets, from Kenya, Afghanistan, India, Egypt and Pakistan. I was struck by the contrasts between different people from different places. Now I am back in the UK, it has made me think about my place in the human jigsaw puzzle.

About four months ago, I started working as research advisor at the Brooke, an international NGO with a focus on animal welfare that aims to improve the lives of working donkeys, horses and mules in developing countries. Millions of people depend on these animals for their livelihood and are unable to earn a living, fetch water or farm their land without them. Kenya was my first overseas assignment with them, and I was amazed by the passion and dedication of my international contemporaries. Despite circumstances that are obviously difficult, they work incredibly hard for both animals and people, and are hungry for knowledge that will help in achieving the goals of improved equine welfare.

My role involves providing research support to our staff in eleven country programmes around the world, and this is where Mendeley comes in. We are in the process of implementing Mendeley so that our colleagues in other countries can have access to the same resources that we do in the UK. We are looking forward to using it as a collaborative tool, to facilitate communication within our professional network worldwide and increase its research capacity. The hope is that this will strengthen our community of working equid specialists—driving forward our goals, widening our scope and also giving ownership of this community and its resources to all of Brooke’s employees equally, rather than them having to rely on the UK office for all their information.

For example: at the moment when our vets are performing a literature review prior to initiating a study, they must look up references, in a language that isn’t their first, often through a tortuously-slow internet connection (think about the highlands of Afghanistan). Most often they are confronted with a paywall and so must email the UK office to see if we have that reference in our repository. Mendeley gives us the chance to provide a ready-made library that will be expandable, along with opportunities for discussion and links between different people who are interested in the same subjects: in other words a true academic social network. Our employees h­­ave one common goal – to ensure healthier,­ happier lives for donkeys, horses and mules in the communities that they work in; and they achieve this through community engagement, training programmes, service provision and advocacy strategies. Increasing cross-communication will strengthen the entire system.

Call it grass roots, sustainable, bottom-up or whichever other buzz word is being overused in development at that moment – facilitating change at the community level is a powerful tool and the idea of people working together to create that change is a strong one. I’m looking forward to using Mendeley to fit the pieces of our jigsaw puzzle together and in doing so start to build up a professional community that will ultimately serve the animals that work tirelessly to help their owners.

 

The Reproducibility Initiative, supported by Mendeley data, gets $1.3M to replicate key findings in cancer biology.

drgunn

The Reproducibility Initiative, a project we’ve written about before, has reached a major milestone. They have been awarded $1.3M in funding from the Center for Open Science and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to replicate 50 key findings in cancer biology. Mendeley has supported the initiative by helping to design the selection process for papers, using Mendeley readership in addition to traditional citation measures.

We try to keep ahead of the issues in research, pushing for open access and better tools for researchers, and over the past few years, from the Stapel affair in psychology to the reports from Bayer and Amgen reports of their failures to replicate most of the high-impact biomedical research they have studied in-house, reproducibility has emerged as a key issue. This comes as no surprise to us, and in fact, John Ioannidis’ paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” has been one of the all-time most highly read papers on Mendeley.

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Yale iGEM Team Uses Mendeley to Make Collaboration Easier

Alice Bonasio

Yale Team

 

A while back, we heard from a group of students at Yale University working for a really exciting project called iGEM. They wanted to use Mendeley so they could collaborate better in their research, and we were more than happy to help out. We also thought it’d be nice to share their experience and insights with the Mendeley community:

We’re the Yale iGEM team, a team of eight undergraduates who research synthetic biology and participate in the annual iGEM (international genetically engineered machines) competition.

From glow-in-the-dark bacteria to fuel-producing cyanobacteria, synthetic biology has a wide variety of applications that can be used to better our world. Each year, the Yale iGEM team comes together to produce a project that uses engineered biology to solve industrial, medical and environmental problems.

Synthetic biology is an emerging subset of science that focuses not only on the study of natural biological systems, but the alteration and design of novel systems. This year, our team is aiming to engineer a common strain of bacteria so that it produces polylactic acid (PLA), a biopolymer and plastic substitute that is cheaper, cleaner to make, and biodegradable.

Mendeley has been really useful in helping with organizing all the background literature and research we have investigated in order to achieve our team’s goals. It’s a great place to store, share and comment on the research that serves as our project’s foundation.

Our university software library offers a few options for reference managers, but Mendeley is more useful to us because it enables a collaborative workspace that doesn’t require us all to be in the same room. In our team, we might have three full-time student researchers in our summer lab while the rest of our researchers may be pursuing other opportunities around the world, so we can’t always meet face-to-face.

Mendeley supported us with an upgraded team package and we have found the ease of adding in members, importing and organizing documents to be highly useful. In addition, the team found that Mendeley combined e-mail, cloud drive and reference management in a very elegant and intuitive way.

We’re grateful for the support and now are really looking forward to the outcomes of our research. We hope to have results by the iGEM World Competition in November 2013, and we’ll post them when they become available!

 

 

Mendeley handles 100 million calls for Open Science, per month

victorhenning1 Comment

Imagine the rich ecosystem of third-party Facebook and Twitter apps, now emerging in the domain of science. More than 240 applications for research collaboration, measurement, visualization, semantic markup, and discovery – all of which have been developed in the past year – receive a constant flow of data from Mendeley. Today, Mendeley announced that the number of queries to its database (termed “API calls”) from those external applications had surpassed 100 million per month.

Akin to a “Wikipedia for academic data”, the information fueling this ecosystem has been crowdsourced by the scientific community itself. Using Mendeley’s suite of document management and collaboration tools, in just three years its global community of 1.9 million researchers has created a shared database containing 65 million unique documents and covering – according to recent studies – 97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. Commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elseviers contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents respectively, but access to their databases is licensed to universities for tens of thousands of dollars per year.

In contrast, Mendeley’s database is freely accessible under a Creative Commons license, and it is the only one that allows third-party developers to build their own tools with the research data anywhere on the web, on mobile devices, or on the desktop. Moreover, because Mendeley’s data is crowdsourced, it has a unique social layer: Each document comes with anonymized real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. Mendeley’s API also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley that the document is being discussed in.

The most popular apps built on Mendeley’s platform fulfill academia’s need for faster and more granular metrics of scientific impact: ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org display a researcher’s or a labs’ real-time impact on the academic community, while Mendeley itself recently announced the first sales of its real-time research impact dashboard to academic institutions around the globe. Hojoki pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. OpenSNP, winner of Mendeley’s $10,001 Binary Battle prize, makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.

Bastian Greshake, co-founder of openSNP, explained: “We started openSNP to crowdsource the discovery of genotype-phenotype associations. In less than a year, our users have uploaded over 200 genetic testing results and more than 3400 phenotypic annotations for over 100 different genetically influenced traits, which is a great success. Mendeley’s API enables our users to find the latest scientific literature – including thousands of Open Access articles – relevant to their own genetic testing results.”

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation and creator of ReaderMeter.org, said: “By sharing a large corpus of open-licensed data, Mendeley is laying the foundation for a whole new science of the making and spreading of scientific knowledge. This offers coders and researchers alike an unprecedented opportunity to map and measure the real-time impact of scientific research. Mendeley’s API is a mountain of data just waiting to be mined.” Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar, co-founders of Total-Impact.org, added: “Using Mendeley’s data, we can show how papers are making a difference long before they show up in the citation record, as well as which papers are making a difference to student readers, or readers in developing countries. Of course, this wouldn’t be possible without Mendeley’s commitment to releasing this data openly, under the CC-BY license.  A lot of us in the Open Science community are convinced that the we’re on the way to a system built on this kind of openness. In the future, researchers will interact with the literature via a web of interlocking, third-party applications for sorting, filtering, and conversing. By opening its valuable data to developers, Mendeley is helping us get there, today.”

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and also a Mendeley Binary Battle judge, added: “This milestone shows how the future of science is being built, app by app, data source by data source. Open data is the biggest science story of the 21st century.”

Dr. Victor Henning, CEO & Co-Founder of Mendeley, said: “Our vision was always to make science more open. The Mendeley API liberates data that has been locked behind paywalls for decades – enabling app developers to reinvent academic workflows, research data discovery, even scientific publishing. Max Planck said: Science progresses funeral by funeral. I think we’ve found a better method.”

Mendeley API graphs and app screenshots:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mendeley/sets/72157631195319638/

Another science startup that's changing how research is done. An interview with Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange.

drgunn

I recently had the chance to sit down with Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange to talk about her company and her vision for accelerating research and development and making research more efficient and reproducible. I really wish Science Exchange had been around when I was finishing my PhD. It would have saved me tons of time and saved the lab money, too.

Special note:
Elizabeth and I are offering a free seminar series on making the transition from academia to industry. If you’re interested in having us speak at your institution, please contact elizabeth.iorns @ scienceexchange.com.Read More »

A tale of two researchers. How we're adapting Mendeley to meet your needs.

drgunn6 Comments

One of the most interesting things about creating software that’s used by millions of people is seeing how the ways people use your software agree with what you expected and also the unexpected ways that people use it. One somewhat unexpected thing we’ve realized is that there are (at least!) two distinct modes of use of Mendeley.


Image via ricephotos

Meet Jane. Jane uses Mendeley as a cloud research storage application. Jane is a graduate student who works mostly on her own and has created and participated in a few public groups. She uses groups mostly for the purpose of discovery of new and interesting research, but also to share what she’s found with others in her field, so public groups are best for her. She keeps her papers in Mendeley so that she can access them easily from wherever she is, on her Desktop PC or Linux machine at work, or her Mac laptop at home, which allows her to work on her manuscripts wherever she is. She sees Mendeley as an application which stores her reading history for easy retrieval and she appreciates the Mendeley Suggests feature to help her discover new research. Jane is a real research hound, needing to store over a thousand papers, and appreciates being able to buy extra storage. Most Mendeley users are like Jane, with or without the need for extra storage.Read More »

What flavor is your research? Take our survey on grant review and tenure decision making.

drgunn

Mendeley is emerging as a leading source of data on how ideas spread and which academics are the most widely read and influential in their respective fields. At Altmetrics12, a gathering of the leading researchers studying how social networks and the web are changing research, several researchers presented papers examining how Mendeley’s readership data compares with traditional research. This research provides independent third-party validation of Mendeley’s research stats and enables developers to create discovery tools to service the needs of many different types of research consumers. How do you use altmetrics? Take our survey!Read More »

Transforming Scholarly Search with Mendeley: Your help needed!

drgunn1 Comment

Changing how research is done is a very big task, and we can’t do it alone. We’re particularly appreciative of our development partners who are working with us to chip away at the problems hindering research efficiency today. One problem is sifting through the volume of search results to find the most important and timely results. Jason Priem of Total Impact is working on this problem at the School for Information Science at the University of North Carolina. He and his colleagues are doing a study to determine if scholarly search can be improved by personalizing search results based on the previous reading history of the scholar — that’s where you come in. If you’re willing to share your academic search and paper reading history to improve science, sign up for his study!
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