Building research applications with Mendeley

  • William Gunn, Mendeley william.gunn@mendeley.com (@mrgunn)

code4lib 2012, Wednesday, February 8 2012, 09:55-10:15

This is partly a tool talk and partly a big idea one.

Mendeley has built the world's largest open database of research and we've now begun to collect some interesting social metadata around the document metadata. I would like to share with the Code4Lib attendees information about using this resource to do things within your application that have previously been impossible for the library community, or in some cases impossible without expensive database subscriptions. One thing that's now possible is to augment catalog search by surfacing information about content usage, allowing people to not only find things matching a query, but popular things or things read by their colleagues. In addition to augmenting search, you can also use this information to augment discovery. Imagine an online exhibit of artifacts from a newly discovered dig not just linking to papers which discuss the artifact, but linking to really good interesting papers about the place and the people who made the artifacts. So the big idea is, "How will looking at the literature from a broader perspective than simple citation analysis change how research is done and communicated? How can we build tools that make this process easier and faster?" I can show some examples of applications that have been built using the Mendeley and PLoS APIs to begin to address this question, and I can also present results from Mendeley's developer challenge which shows what kinds of applications researchers are looking for, what kind of applications peope are building, and illustrates some interesting places where the two don't overlap.