Since its launch in 2009, mendeley.com has gathered a user base of two million who have, to date, uploaded more than 280 million documents between them. It began as a software tool for organizing papers from scholarly journals but has become a platform for connecting like-minded researchers and helping academics discover new papers. This is one of the many technology services, including Altmetric, Academica.edu and Zotero, that are enabling university researchers to go digital and get social.
While the focus of Mendeley has primarily been to improve the productivity of researchers by taking the labour out of document search and organisation, the founders are keen to move it forward: The next step involves connecting people as well as documents. It will help researchers discover groups on Mendeley doing similar work to them and use that to connect people with other academics with whom they might want to collaborate. Link to the full Irish Times article by Marie Boran here.
