Crowdsourcing Real-Time Impact Factorsand a Semantic Research DatabaseVictor HenningMendeley

“Science progresses funeral by funeral.”Max Planck

“The entire history of science in the last 50 years could be written in terms of

papers rejected by Science and Nature.”Paul Lauterbur

This talk is about post-publication quality measurements.

The current “Gold Standard”, the Impact Factor:

extremely skewed distribution

wrong incentives to researchers (target only high-impact journals, “bite-sized papers“, citation bartering) and editors (encouraging self-citations, review articles)

studies find that only 20% of papers cited have actually been read

arbitrary time window favours fast-evolving disciplines

Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, Vol. 8, 2008

Analogy in music:

“Scrobbling tracks“

Article usage metrics

works like this:

1) Install “Audioscrobbler”

2) Listen to music

3) Last.fm builds your music profile... and the world‘s biggest open music database

Why not build the same system for science?

Track article pervasiveness in reference manager libraries

Track article reading time in PDF viewers

Track user tags and ratings Key

difference:preserve privacy

2) Manage your

research papers

1) Install Mendeley Desktop

Automatic data extractionExternal database integrationAutomatic bibliography generationTagging and annotation

Mendeley works like this:

2) Manage your

research papers

1) Install Mendeley Desktop

3) Mendeley aggregates research data in the cloud

Mendeley works like this:

We’re aggregating a crowdsourced research database

with a unique layer of social & real-time usage stats.

11m research papers (and 217m references) uploaded:

After 12 months in public beta (version 0.9):

Top 20 institutions using Mendeley: University of Cambridge

Stanford University MIT

Imperial College LondonHarvard University

University of Edinburgh University of Michigan

University of OxfordUniversity College London

UC BerkeleyMax Planck Society

Cornell UniversityUniversity of Wisconsin

RWTH AachenColumbia University

Princeton University University of Cologne

Yale UniversityUniversity of DundeeUniversity of Florida

After 12 months in public beta (version 0.9):

3.

Top articles of 2009 by readership on Mendeley 1. 2.

Correlation between ISI Citations and Mendeley Readershipfor ISI’s Top Five Biology Papers 2009

Journal aggregate stats:

Dr. Peter Binfield, Public Library of

Science:

Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.comJournal aggregate stats:

Select relation:

supportsrefutescomplementsuses same method...

Result:A human-curated,

constantly evolving semantic article

database

www.mendeley.com