While replication and further study are needed, these data suggest that cross-publisher article recommendations via TrendMD may enhance citations of scholarly articles.Īs global research output continues to increase, the competition for readers’ attention amongst scholarly publishers, journals, and, authors is becoming tougher.
This is the first randomized controlled trial to show how an online cross-publisher distribution channel (TrendMD) enhances article saves on Mendeley. There was a positive correlation between pageviews driven by TrendMD and article saves on Mendeley (Spearman’s rho r = 0.60). The difference in mean Mendeley saves for TrendMD articles versus control was 2.7, 95% CI (2.63, 2.77), and statistically significant ( p < 0.01). Articles randomized to TrendMD showed a 77% increase in article saves on Mendeley relative to control. Our primary outcome compares the 4-week mean Mendeley saves of articles randomized to TrendMD versus control. Four hundred articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research were randomized to either the TrendMD arm ( n = 200) or the control arm ( n = 200) of the study. We conducted a 4-week randomized controlled trial to examine how promotion of article links in a novel online cross-publisher distribution channel (TrendMD) affect article saves on Mendeley. There are currently no evidenced-based distribution strategies that have been shown to increase article saves on Mendeley. saves) on the online reference manager, Mendeley, correlate to future citations.
Since making this change, Elsevier has released its replacement for Mendeley Desktop, Mendeley Reference Manager, which is essentially a wrapper around the website and doesn’t contain a real local database at all.Prior research shows that article reader counts (i.e. The API is under Elsevier’s control and can be changed or discontinued at any time. Mendeley offers a web-based API, but it contains only uploaded data, so relying on it means that anyone wanting to export their own data first needs to upload all their data and files to Elsevier’s servers.
The export formats supported by Mendeley don’t contain folders, various metadata fields (date added, favorite, and others), or PDF annotations.
Elsevier later stated that the change was required by new European privacy regulations - a bizarre claim, given that those regulations are designed to give people control over their data and guarantee data portability, not the opposite - and continued to assert, falsely, that full local export was still possible, while repeatedly dismissing reports of the change as “#fakenews”.ĭirect access to the Mendeley database is the only local way to export the full contents of one’s own research.
The Mendeley 1.19 release notes claimed that the encryption was for “improved security” on shared machines, yet applications rarely encrypt their local data files, as file protections are generally handled by the operating system with account permissions and full-disk encryption, and anyone using the same operating system account or an admin account can already install a keylogger to capture passwords. Until recently, Mendeley Desktop imported data from Zotero’s own open database, as it had since 2009. Elsevier made this change a few months after Zotero publicly announced work on an importer, despite having long touted the openness of its database format as a guarantee against lock-in and explaining in its documentation that the database could be accessed using standard tools. Starting in Mendeley Desktop 1.19, Elsevier began encrypting the local Mendeley database, making it unreadable by Zotero and other standard database tools.