Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works. The announcement has generated a lot of hype for the fledgling company.
TechCrunch, a popular technology blog, says the company—which is still less than a year old—could surpass Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the largest research-paper database, by April 2010. Mendeley says it is doubling in size every 10 weeks.
Mendeley is more than just a dumping ground for academic work. It calls itself “the Last.fm for research papers” (after the popular music-based social network) because it goes through millions of research papers looking for data and then recommends work of interest to academics. For now the site is free, but Mendeley plans to add extra services at an additional cost.
4 Responses to ‘The Last.fm for Research Papers’ Tops 100,000 Users
drgunn - November 19, 2009 at 4:29 pm
As academic community liaison for Mendeley, I can confirm that the announcement did indeed generate quite a bit of hype. Unfortunately, it also brought out the “Your Favorite Band Sucks” people. We all know someone who has a seemingly irrational hatred of twitter, right?The promose of the technology, though, is accurate and near real-time usage and impact stats for papers, freeing people from having to worry about getting their paper into a high impact factor journal. In combination with their work with academic libraries to promote the use of institutional repositories and increase the visibility of open access material, this could present a real fundamental change in how research is communicated.
bwgrnwy - November 20, 2009 at 1:05 am
I only count about 50,000 users on the Mandelay disciplines stats page. How many of these users are active? Or have 50,000 people just signed up or downloaded at some point?
11159995 - November 20, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I don’t see how this really has the effect of “freeing people from having to worry about getting their paper into a high impact factor journal.” Usage alone means nothing; it all depends on who is using your article. What guarantee does Mendeley have that its users are legitimate scholars at prestigious universities. Can it point to stats that reveal at what universities the articles are being accessed?
billso - November 21, 2009 at 1:16 am
Looks like an interesting service – it’s certinaly worth a try, especially if you already use CiteULike, because those entries can be synced into Mendeley.