Mendeley’s API and University Libraries: Three Examples to Create Value

  • Ian Mulvany, Mendeley

Code4Lib 2011, Thursday 10 February, 09:35 - 09:55

Mendeley is a technology startup that is helping to revolutionize the way research is done. Used by more than 600,000 academics and industry researchers, Mendeley enables researchers to arrange collaborative projects, work and discuss in groups, as well as share data across its web platform. Launched in London in December 2008, Mendeley is already the world’s largest research collaboration platform. Through this platform, we anonymously pools users’ research paper collections, creating a crowd-sourced research database with a unique layer of social information - each research paper is connected with socio-demographic information about its audience. Based on this platform and data, I will present three examples of how Mendeley is working to support university libraries and contribute to opening up academic research: 1) Mendeley’s integration as a workflow tool with institutional repositories with the aim of increasing IR deposit rates; 2) Application examples building on Mendeley’s API to showcase what is possible with the newly available type of usage data Mendeley is aggregating; 3) Preview of Mendeley’s library dashboard that will reveal content usage within an institution.