Mendeley
By sylvie | November 28, 2008
Daniel Lemire has pointed me to an interesting social networking tool for scientists: Mendeley.com, a website to manage and share your science papers. There’s also a desktop version if you don’t want to use the collaborative aspect of it.
Topics: Social Software |
November 28th, 2008 at 9:38
The social networking component of their tool is very limited, but I think my profile page looks good:
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/daniel-lemire
November 28th, 2008 at 10:27
[…] Among scientists-bloggers, the new buzz word is Mendeley: a social networking platform for scientists (Ricardo Vidal, Sylvie Noël, Misha Lemeshko, Michael Kuhn, …). The site is barely getting started and is still in early beta, there are bugs and limitations. However, the London-based has funding and a solid staff. […]
November 28th, 2008 at 12:16
Thanks Sylvie, for picking up Mendeley! I would like to add to your comment that you obviously don’t have to use Mendeley Desktop (you can only use Mendeley Web), but besides helping you to additionally manage your research papers Mendeley Desktop automatically extracts the metadata from your research papers and adds them to your website on Mendeley Web (your profile when it’s your publication(s), or otherwise your online library).
November 29th, 2008 at 6:04
How does Mendeley compare to https://www.researchgate.net/
?
December 1st, 2008 at 7:20
It looks like Mendeley is centered around research papers whereas Researchgate is more of a social network. Think of the difference between something like Flickr (where the photo is the center of attention) and Facebook (where the user is the center of attention).
December 1st, 2008 at 9:52
Sylvie, that’s mostly correct. We believe that new connections between researchers and academics should emerge based on data, e.g. similarities between their research libraries, etc., and not based on already existing connections, as it is the case with many social networks. At Last.fm for example, via collaborative filtering you will discover new tracks that are of interest to you because someone else with a similar taste listened to that track before as well. Here’s a small presentation explaining our vision of “A Last.fm for Research”: http://www.mendeley.com/blog/2008/07/an-excellent-euroscience-adventure-part-ii/
Still, very soon Mendeley will offer more “standard” social networking features as well (groups, friendfinder, etc.), but additionally relationships and discovery of academic knowledge in Mendeley will rely on data.
Plus, Mendeley offers users a free and powerful tool to manage and share research papers
December 14th, 2008 at 14:35
Seems like a good idea as I have not come accross any web 2.0 networking specially for scientists.