Mendeley as a Source of Readership by Students and Postdocs? Evaluating Article Usage by Academic Status

This paper explores readership counts provided by the social reference manager Mendeley as a source for usage statistics for scientific papers, based on a sample of 1.2 million documents published in journals from the four disciplines Biomedical Research, Clinical Medicine, Health and Psychology. It is shown that the percentage of papers with at least one user on Mendeley (65.9%) as well as the average number of readers per document (9.6) is quite high compared to the uptake and average activity on other social media platforms. The majority of users are PhD and postgraduate students as well as postdocs. Correlations with citations are overall positive, with reading patterns of PhD students and postdocs being in general more similar to citation patterns than that of other professionals and librarians, which reflects expected usage behavior. Important differences concerning these results can be observed between particular research fields, reflecting the particular usage patterns of certain user groups as well as the general uptake of Mendeley in these fields. Most importantly it is shown that differences between usage behavior of user types cannot be accurately determined, as Mendeley only provides only the top 3 user types per document