Mendeley is a company based in London, UK, which provides products and services for academic researchers. It is most known for its reference manager which is used to manage and share research papers[2] and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.
Mendeley was named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev,[3] and founded in London in November 2007 by three German PhD students. The first public beta version was released in August 2008. The company's investors included some people previously involved with Last.fm, Skype, and Warner Music Group,[4] as well as academics from Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.
Early success
Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt receiving the Plugg "European Start-up of the Year" award, 2009
Mendeley won several awards in 2009 including Plugg.eu "European Start-up of the Year 2009",[5][6] TechCrunch Europas "Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society 2009",[7] and The Guardian ranked it #6 in "Top 100 tech media companies".[8]
In 2012, Mendeley was one of the repositories for green Open Access recommended by Peter Suber.[9] The recommendation was revoked after Elsevier bought Mendeley.[10]
Purchase by Elsevier
Mendeley was purchased by the academic publisher Elsevier in early 2013. The deal price was speculated to be €50 million (US$65 million).[11] The sale led to debate on scientific networks and in the media interested in Open Access,[12] and upset members of the scientific community[13] who felt that the Mendeley's acquisition by Elsevier was antithetical to Mendeley's open sharing model.[14]
David Dobbs, in The New Yorker, suggested Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley could have been to acquire its user data and/or to "destroy or coopt an open-science icon that threatens its business model."[14]
This was contrasted to a non-profit service like Unpaywall, which marketed itself as not susceptible to a sell-out to Elsevier.[15]
Extensions to product line
After acquisition, Mendeley subsequently extended its product line into new areas while continuing to iterate on its reference manager.
On September 23, 2013, Mendeley announced iPhone and iPad apps.[16] An Android app followed shortly after.
On January 12, 2015, Mendeley announced the acquisition of Newsflo, a service which provided links to press coverage of researchers' work.[17][18] The functionality was subsequently incorporated into Mendeley Feed and Mendeley Profile.
In April 2016, Mendeley Data, a platform for sharing citable research datasets online, was promoted out of beta.[19]
In October 2016, Mendeley Careers was launched to help researchers to locate job opportunities. [20] As of August 2019, Mendeley Careers offered 295k science and technology job opportunities.
On May 24, 2019, Mendeley announced two new products: Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Cite.[21]
Mendeley Desktop, the original reference manager based on the Qt framework that runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac and Linux
Mendeley Reference Manager (Beta), a replacement reference manager built with Electron that also runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and all major web browsers
Mendeley Web Importer, a browser extension that imports metadata and retrieves legal full text scholarly articles discovered on the Web
Mendeley Cite, an add-in for Microsoft Word for citing references and generating bibliographies
Mendeley mobile apps for reading articles on the go, available for iOS and Android
Mendeley Profile, a public showcase for research outputs and receiving citation and usage statistics on one's personal research output
Mendeley Catalog, a crowd-sourced index of scholarly articles with over 90 million unique records
Mendeley Feed, a timeline of new publications from the Mendeley profiles of followed researchers and their mentions in the media
Mendeley Suggest, email recommendations of new articles to read based on use within Mendeley
Mendeley Careers, a job listings and CV hosting site for researchers
Mendeley Funding, a search portal for research funding opportunities
Mendeley Institutional Edition, enabling institutional administrators to gain analytical insights into their researchers' use of journals while upgrading reference manager storage and group collaborator limits [22]
Mendeley Developer Portal, which offers open APIs for interacting with the reference manager programmatically
Notable features
Mendeley reader counts, a unique readership statistic which has been asserted to predict citation impact [23]
Automatic extraction of metadata from PDF articles
Claim authored publications by linking the user's Mendeley Profile to Scopus Author Profile
Private groups to share and annotate research papers within copyright-compliant responsible sharing guidelines
Incidents
In 2018, an update to Mendeley resulted in some users losing PDFs and annotations stored in their accounts.[24] Elsevier fixed the issue for most users after a number of weeks.[25]
↑Thelwall, Mike (2018-06-01). "Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts" (in en). Scientometrics115 (3): 1231–1240. doi:10.1007/s11192-018-2715-9. ISSN1588-2861.