Mendeley Readers

What it is

Mendeley is a social reference manager. Mendeley Readers is a count of the number of users that have added a particular document to their private Mendeley libraries. The Mendeley API provides associated information including metadata, counts by academic status, discipline, and country (1). Coverage includes journal articles, books, conference papers, and some web pages. Aggregated demographic information about Mendeley readers, such as geographic location and discipline, are also available.

How it works

Mendeley Readers is an indicator of readership. Mendeley Reader counts have been shown to have moderate correlation with later citation (2). Readership metrics like Mendeley Readers may provide valuable evidence for publications that are not indexed by citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Mendeley readers can accrue for any paper that has been mentioned at least once on social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

What to keep in mind

  • Mendeley readers can be considered evidence of early impact of scholarly works (2).
  • A small percentage of researchers use Mendeley, so reader counts are typically an underestimation (3).
  • Readership indicators can be used to complement citation indicators (1).
  • Compare like with like – Just like citations, readership indicators differ by field and over time (1).
  • In fields within the Social Sciences and Humanities, the mean number of Mendeley Readers may be greater than the mean number of citations (2).
  • Mendeley user data are self-reported, so academic status or geographic region may be inaccurate or incomplete (1).
  • There are known biases in the coverage of some geographical areas, such as China or Russia (1).
  • Mendeley data does not provide information about the temporal aspects of readership, or how readers change over time (1).
  • Mendeley Readers reflects items such as editorial material, letters, news items, book reviews, etc. that are not typically counted in citation indexes.

Learn more

Zahedi, Z. and Costas, R., 2020. Do Online Readerships Offer Useful Assessment Tools? Discussion Around the Practical Applications of Mendeley Readership for Scholarly Assessment. Scholarly Assessment Reports, 2(1), p.14. http://doi.org/10.29024/sar.20

A guide to commonly used resource types found in the Mendeley API

How Altmetric tracks Mendeley Readers

Wikipedia citations
Twitter mentions

References

  1. Zahedi, Z. and Costas, R., 2020. Do Online Readerships Offer Useful Assessment Tools? Discussion Around the Practical Applications of Mendeley Readership for Scholarly Assessment. Scholarly Assessment Reports, 2(1), p.14. http://doi.org/10.29024/sar.20
  2. Zahedi, Z., Costas, R., & Wouters, P. (2017). Mendeley readership as a filtering tool to identify highly cited publications. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(10), 2511–2521. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23883
  3. Van Noorden, R. (2014). Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network. Nature News, 512(7513), 126. https://doi.org/10.1038/512126a
  4. Thelwall, M. (2018). Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts. Scientometrics, 115(3), 1231–1240. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2715-9

Last updated September 2022