[GOAL] Re: Les Carr's analyses of Mendeley on Repositoryman

[Steve Hitchcock]

Possibly of some tangential relevance, and just out but no green OA version yet, AFAIK:

Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement
Xuemei Li, Mike Thelwall, and Dean Giustini
Scientometrics, (21 Dec 2011)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/35146th23t1j1284/
Abstract: This paper investigates whether CiteULike and Mendeley are useful for measuring scholarly influence, using a sample of 1,613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007. Traditional citation counts from the Web of Science (WoS) were used as benchmarks to compare with the number of users who bookmarked the articles in one of the two free online reference manager sites. Statistically significant correlations were found between the user counts and the corresponding WoS citation counts, suggesting that this type of influence is related in some way to traditional citation-based scholarly impact but the number of users of these systems seems to be still too small for them to challenge traditional citation indexes.

Steve

Steve Hitchcock
WAIS Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk
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On 3 Jan 2012, at 18:01, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: Les A Carr <lac -- ecs.soton.ac.uk>
>> Date: January 3, 2012 11:24:40 AM EST
>> Subject: Re: Mendeley users
>> 
>> ...I did do a couple of analyses of Mendeley effectiveness for OA about 12 months ago.
>> You can see my writeups here:
>> 
>> http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-download-vs-upload-growth.html
>> and
>> http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-measuring-oa-rates.html
>> 
>> ...Mendley is not any more successful in providing OA than repositories
>> are and in fact it is very disappointing in the number of open PDFs that it has created...
>> 
>> I have detailed spreadsheets and can redo the analyses if they are interesting/useful.
>> --
>> les
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 24 Dec 2011, at 04:06, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>> 
>> Arthur,
>> 
>> Thanks for the data about Mendeley. I have a few questions about things I don't understand;
>> 
>> 1.4 million people have downloaded and installed Mendeley, from 32,000 institutions. This means little, I think, though giving us another estimate of the number of research institutions. That there are 122,000 groups totally dwarfs the number of institutional repositories
>> 
>> As far as I can tell, groups are subsets of people who have agreed to share their reference lists. This is the power set of the number of institutions, indeed of the number of individuals, so it is bound to be huge, given the number of k/N subgroupings are combinatorially possible!
>> 
>> and 143 million articles is not to be sneezed at, though there is doubtless a lot of replicates.
>> 
>> But what are they. Assuming they are indeed full-texts and not just bibliographic citations (of writings by Aristotle, for example) what we need to know is what percentage of total papers published in (say) 2010 they represent. (About 20% is the figure to beat. That's the spontaneous UNMANDATED self-archiving rate -- including both websites and repositories. Seventy percent would be the figure to match or beat for MANDATED self-archiving.
>> 
>> To pursue the analysis a bit further, if the eight ID/OA mandated institutions have about 1000 academics each on overage, that’s 8,000 authors. The 200 dubious mandates contribute 1000 x 200 x 10% = 20,000 people, making 28,000 people contributing.
>> 
>> I'm not quite sure why we are counting these authors from mandating institutions. The percentage of Mendel-OA papers per year is one benchmark. Another is the percentage of Mendel-OA papers at a given UNMANDATED institution.
>> 
>> Do you see why I am now interested in the ‘social media’ pull rather than the IR push?
>> 
>> Not yet, I'm afraid. What are needed in order to judge how well Mendel-OA is doing relative to gold OA, unmandated green OA ad mandated green OA is the comparative percentages I mention above.
>> 
>> This perhaps begins to answer whether I can I justify my excitement?
>> 
>> Mendeley is an exciting, useful tool -- but whether it is accelerating OA is not at all clear from the data you cite. (And I'm not clear on how how Mendeley stocks up: Only through authors importing, or does it also harvest from what's already on the web (i.e., unmandated green OA>?
>> 
>> Chrs, S
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
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