This paper presents a fine-grained overview of the usage behavior and topics of interest of different types of users in Mendeley. The analysis is based on 1.2 million Web of Science indexed... Show moreThis paper presents a fine-grained overview of the usage behavior and topics of interest of different types of users in Mendeley. The analysis is based on 1.2 million Web of Science indexed publications published in 2012. The disciplinary differences in the reading (saving) patterns of different types of Mendeley users are identified and depicted using VOSviewer overlay visualizations. The findings show that compared to other fields, publications from Mathematics & Computer Science have the lowest coverage in Mendeley. Publications from the Social Sciences & Humanities receive on average the highest number of readers in Mendeley. The highest uptake of Mendeley is by students, but this differs across fields. Professors, students, and librarians are mainly active in the Social Sciences & Humanities, a field of science with a relatively low citation density in Web of Science. In contrast, researchers and other professionals are mainly active in fields with a relatively high citation density such as the Biomedical & Health Sciences and the Life & Earth Sciences. In addition, it seems that researchers and professionals are relatively more interested in practical, methodological, and technical oriented topics while professors and students are attracted by the more educational and theoretical oriented topics. These different usage patterns among user types possibly reflect the way in which scholarly publications are used for scientific, educational, or other professional purposes. This information could inform relevant stakeholders, such as researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, and policy makers of the scientific, educational, or professional values of publications. Show less
This paper presents the results of a study in which we have analysed the topics of interest of Mendeley users (i.e. Students, PhDs, Post Docs, Researchers, Professors, Librarians, Lecturers &... Show moreThis paper presents the results of a study in which we have analysed the topics of interest of Mendeley users (i.e. Students, PhDs, Post Docs, Researchers, Professors, Librarians, Lecturers & other Professionals) using text mining and visualization techniques. Beside analyzing topics of interest of Mendeley users, we have also identified fields of science for which readership information can be an interesting source of information complementary to citation information. For this purpose, we have used WoS citation data and Mendeley readership data for a set of 980,698 WoS publications (articles and reviews) with a DOI from 20111.The VOSviewer software tool (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010) was used to create so-called overlay visualizations. These visualizations show additional information on top of a base map. Two types of base maps were used. A base map containing the 250 WoS subject categories was used to analyze differences in readership activity across research fields and to analyze differences in interest between types of users. Base maps containing terms extracted from titles and abstracts using the text mining functionality of VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2011) were used to analyze differences in readership activity within research fields. Show less
