Mendeley is a handy piece of desktop and web software for managing and sharing research papers [1]. This popular tool has been getting a lot of attention lately, and with some impressive statistics it’s not difficult to see why. At the time of writing Mendeley claims to have over 36 million papers, added by just under half a million users working at more than 10,000 research institutions around the world. That’s impressive considering the startup company behind it have only been going for a few years. The major established commercial players in the field of bibliographic databases (WoK and Scopus) currently have around 40 million documents, so if Mendeley continues to grow at this rate, they’ll be more popular than Jesus (and Elsevier and Thomson) before you can say “bibliography”. But to get a real handle on how big Mendeley is we need to know how many of those 36 million documents are unique because if there are lots of duplicated documents then it will affect the overall head count. (more…)
September 1, 2010
How many unique papers are there in Mendeley?
December 12, 2006
Buggotea: Redundant Links in Connotea
Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas* is a better version of Connotea, please can you sort out it’s duplicated redundant links? In my book this particular bug is “buggotea” number one. Here is the problem… [update: buggotea is partially fixed, see comments from Ian Mulvany at the nodalpoint link in the references below]
There is this handy bioinformatics web application called Connotea which I like to use, built by those nice people in the web team at Nature Publishing Group. Most readers of nodalpoint probably already know about it, but because you’re Santa and you’ve been busy lately, let me explain. Connotea can help scientists (not just bioinformaticians) to organise and share their bibliographic references, whilst discovering what other people with similar interests are reading. It’s good, but it has some bugs in it. Since it’s open-source software, anyone with the time, inclination and skills can get hold of the connotea source code and improve it. There is, however, one particularly nasty redundancy bug in Connotea that is bugging me [1]. I think it should be fixable, and that doing so would make Connotea a significantly better application than it already is. Let’s illustrate this bug with a little story…
O'Really? 