This week, leading academic institutions worldwide signed up to a new data dashboard by London-based startup Mendeley.
This week, leading academic institutions worldwide signed up to a new data dashboard by London-based startup Mendeley. The dashboard analyzes their research activity and impact on the global research community in real time - down from the 3-5 year time lag of the "Impact Factor", the current gold standard for such evaluations. This allows academic institutions to react faster to their faculty's research needs and provide them with quicker, more personalized support during the research process - thus accelerating the pace of scientific discovery.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120807/CL52546 )
The Impact Factor, a measure of the number of citations an academic journal receives, is a pivotal metric of science: Academics have to publish in high-Impact Factor journals to receive promotions, tenure, or grant funding, and universities allocate their million-dollar library budgets to those same high-Impact Factor journals. This is despite the Impact Factor's many known flaws - the most limiting of which is that the citations it is based on take 3-5 years to accumulate.
This week's release of Mendeley's Institutional Edition, distributed by leading Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets, brings research impact measurement to real-time speed. It allows research institutions to see detailed analytics of the journals their academics are reading, the journals they are publishing in, and how many readers those publications have. This data is built on Mendeley's global research community of more than 1.8 million academics who are using the startup's tools for document management, discovery, and collaboration.
The first customers of Mendeley's data dashboard are premier international research institutions: Two prominent universities on the East Coast and in the Bay Area, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Nevada, Reno, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council Japan.
Speaking of the announcement, Dr. Tod Colegrove, Head of DeLaMare Science & Engineering Library at University of Nevada, Reno, said: "Rather than spending vast amounts of staff resources attempting to quantify usage of existing library resources, Mendeley offers a unique and immediate lens into the library's researchers' information behaviors. Purchase decisions can be informed directly by past and present actual use of potential library resources." His colleague Lisa Kurt added: "The collaborative nature of Mendeley is a gamechanger for our institution where departments and colleges are working to break through their silos and focus on the best parts of the work they do. Mendeley is solving a very real problem in a rather elegant way."
At the University of Western Ontario, Head Librarian Joyce Garnett commented: "Western Libraries is proud to be an early adopter of Mendeley Institutional Edition. It will enable us to assess the relevance and use of our collections."
Several peer-reviewed studies have recently highlighted the positive correlation of Mendeley's readership data with the Impact Factor. Dr. Victor Henning, CEO and co-founder of Mendeley, said: "I'm excited that after receiving scientific validation from the research community, our data is now helping some of the world's best universities work more efficiently and get to life-changing discoveries faster. My inner nerd is going: Wow, this is freaking amazing."
Mendeley is a global research collaboration platform and academic database. Since its launch in 2009, Mendeley has grown to more than 1.8 million users, who have collectively uploaded more than 250 million documents. Screenshots and press photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mendeley