Mendeley: a "Facebook for Researchers"?

Aaron Tay gives here an interesting vision of this still-promising tool:

“while looking at the features I finally grasped how powerful and disruptive a real and dominant “Facebook for researchers” is going to be. (…)

Of course, the road to such a goal has being strewn with many failures, including Elsevier’s 2collab , Labmeeting etc (check a report in 2008 of such tools and check how many still stands) and attempts have being or could be made from social bookmarking/reference management angle (e.g citeulike/Connotea/Mendeley),  Discovery/Search angle (potentially webscale discovery/next generation catalogues with social features) or  even more directly straight forward Identity management (e.g. ResearcherID).

But no matter who wins how would a dominant “Facebook for researchers” platform affect academic research and hence academic libraries? What areas would they disrupt? (..)

Disrupt search including webscale discovery tools

Mendeley , Citeulike etc are already starting to show hints of this, when you search you can see how many people put a certain article in their reference libraries, that itself could be a strong signal of quality. (…)

Currently Mendeley claims to have 150 million unique items (Jan 2012) when you search Mendeley , ”This makes it, according to Victor Henning, the company’s CEO and co-founder, the world’s largest research database.” (…)

Read more at:

Tay, Aaron. How a “Facebook for researchers” platform will disrupt almost everything. Musing about librarianship, April 18, 2012. Available at: http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-facebook-for-researchers-will.html [Accessed 18th April 2012]

 

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