0. Visualizing readership activity of Mendeley users using VOSviewer
Zohreh Zahedi & Nees Jan van Eck
Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS-Leiden University)
23 June 2014

1. Introduction Mendeley: one of the most important altmetric tools
For publications in Mendeley readerships statistics are available
‘Type of users’ of the Mendeley readerships are available for readerships & publications
Possibility of different types of impact
Readership habits across types of users
But, with the limitation: Mendeley only reports the 3 ‘top’ frequent types of users per publication

2. Research questions
What are the differences in readership activity across research fields?
In which fields are Mendeley users most and least active?
What are the fields of interest for the different ‘known’ users?
Are there differences?

3. Methodology All 2011 WoS articles & reviews with a DOI
1,114,776 publications (citations counted up to 2013)
Readerships statistics collected through the REST API
847,587 (76%) saved in Mendeley
438,399 (52%) all the readers were known
VOS viewer for overlay visualizations
250 JCR subject categories
Terms from titles & abstracts

4. Readerships by subject category
Readerships/publication
Areas with higher readerships per publication:
Cell biology
Biomedical sciences
Multidiscisciplinary
Neurosciences
Business & management
Readerships/Citation
Readership activity vs. citation activity:
Social Sciences
Humanities

5. Social sciences & humanities
Lit. & pol. science
Cognitive psychology
Higher focus on cognitive psychology, innovation and markeing
Lowe attention to literature & political sciences
General medicine topics
Marketing & innovation

6. Readerships: PhDs vs. Professors
(PhDs/all PhDs)
(Readerships/all readerships)
Only papers with known users (52%)
PhDs:
Chemistry
Engineering
(Prof./all Profs.)
(Readerships/all readerships)
Professors:
Mathematics, applied
Political science
Statistics & probability

7. Conclusions Mendeley: rich source of altmetric information
Disciplinary differences in readership activity: biomedical sciences, life sciences and social sciences
Differences among ‘Mendeley’ users across disciplines
Future research: understand better these differences
Data problems, distribution of users by fields, genuine content differences, etc.

8. Thank you very much for your attention!
Questions?
Comments?