Abstract
This paper presents a fine-grained overview of the usage behavior and topics of interest of different types of users in Mendeley. The analysis is based on 1.2 million Web of Science indexed publications published in 2012. The disciplinary differences in the reading (saving) patterns of different types of Mendeley users are identified and depicted using VOSviewer overlay visualizations. The findings show that compared to other fields, publications from Mathematics & Computer Science have the lowest coverage in Mendeley. Publications from the Social Sciences & Humanities receive on average the highest number of readers in Mendeley. The highest uptake of Mendeley is by students, but this differs across fields. Professors, students, and librarians are mainly active in the Social Sciences & Humanities, a field of science with a relatively low citation density in Web of Science. In contrast, researchers and other professionals are mainly active in fields with a relatively high citation density such as the Biomedical & Health Sciences and the Life & Earth Sciences. In addition, it seems that researchers and professionals are relatively more interested in practical, methodological, and technical oriented topics while professors and students are attracted by the more educational and theoretical oriented topics. These different usage patterns among user types possibly reflect the way in which scholarly publications are used for scientific, educational, or other professional purposes. This information could inform relevant stakeholders, such as researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, and policy makers of the scientific, educational, or professional values of publications.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundThe social reference manager tool Mendeley is a prevalent source of altmetric data
We have explored the usage of 1.2 million Web of Science (WoS) indexed publications by different user types in Mendeley
The findings of this study show that there are quite some disciplinary differences in terms of readership activity and in terms of the topics of interest among different user types in Mendeley
Summary
The readership activity of Mendeley users has, for instance, been analyzed using the 5 main disciplines and 22 sub-disciplines from the NSF classification system (Haustein & Larivière 2014; Mohammadi et al 2015), the 250 subject categories available in the WoS database (Zahedi & Van Eck 2015), and the 310 subject areas available in the Scopus database (Thelwall 2017) The results of these studies show that substantial differences in readership practices between (sub)fields and user types exist. Most of the previous studies are based on restricted Mendeley data (only top three user types per publication) and focus on broad fields of science It is not known yet how readership per user type varies across detailed micro-level fields and how these user types differ in their topics of interest.
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