Visualizing readership activity of Mendeley users using VOSviewer

Zohreh Zahedi & Nees Jan van EckCenter for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS-Leiden University)

23 June 2014

Introduction

• Mendeley: one of the most important altmetric tools

• For publications in Mendeley readerships statistics are available

• ‘Type of users’ of the Mendeley readerships are available for readerships & publications• Possibility of different types of impact• Readership habits across types of users

• But, with the limitation: Mendeley only reports the 3 ‘top’ frequent types of users per publication

Research questions

• What are the differences in readership activity across research fields?• In which fields are Mendeley users most and

least active?• What are the fields of interest for the different

‘known’ users?• Are there differences?

Methodology• All 2011 WoS articles & reviews with a DOI• 1,114,776 publications (citations counted up to

2013)

• Readerships statistics collected through the REST API• 847,587 (76%) saved in Mendeley• 438,399 (52%) all the readers were known

• VOS viewer for overlay visualizations• 250 JCR subject categories• Terms from titles & abstracts

Readerships by subject categoryReaderships/publication

Readerships/Citation

Areas with higher readerships per publication:- Cell biology- Biomedical sciences- Multidiscisciplinary- Neurosciences- Business & management

Readership activity vs. citation activity:- Social Sciences- Humanities

Social sciences & humanitiesLit. & pol. science

Cognitive psychology

Marketing & innovationGeneral medicine topics

Readerships: PhDs vs. ProfessorsOnly papers with known users (52%)

PhDs:- Chemistry- Engineering

(PhDs/all PhDs)(Readerships/all readerships)

Professors:- Mathematics, applied- Political science- Statistics & probability

(Prof./all Profs.)(Readerships/all readerships)

Conclusions• Mendeley: rich source of altmetric

information• Disciplinary differences in readership activity:

biomedical sciences, life sciences and social sciences

• Differences among ‘Mendeley’ users across disciplines• Future research: understand better these differences• Data problems, distribution of users by fields, genuine

content differences, etc.

Thank you very much for your attention!

Questions?Comments?

z.zahedi.2@cwts.leidenuniv.nl