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
The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate... Show moreThe main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health sciences’ and ‘Mathematics and computer science’ are the fields with respectively the most and the least readership activity in Mendeley. PhD students have the highest density of readerships per publication and Lecturers and Librarians have the lowest across all the different fields. Our precision-recall analysis indicates that in general, for publications with at least one reader in Mendeley, the capacity of readerships of filtering highly cited publications is better than (or at least as good as) Journal Citation Scores. We discuss the important limitation of Mendeley of only reporting the top three readers and not all of them in the potential development of indicators based on Mendeley and its users. Show less
