Thoughts on Mendeley

The presentation on Mendeley was well executed and I feel that the presentation, as a whole, leaned towards the good aspects of the app.

Firstly, they emphasized mainly on how Mendeley facilitates online research collaboration between peers. They juxtaposed Mendeley and other collaborative apps such as Google Drive, bringing across how Mendeley takes things a step higher to provide better functionalities to the user in terms of collaboration. I would say that this is the main crux (or selling point) of the app, and they did a good job in convincing us on how Mendeley is clearly superior on this front.

Secondly, they talked about how there is a lack of real time syncing for the app, as compared to other traditional cloud services which does this for us normally. It was emphasized that real time syncing has become a default expectation for users nowadays and hence should not be missing from its implementation. I feel that this is quite significant, but not mainly because it has become a norm amongst apps today, but because of the fact that it is closely tied with the main selling point of the app - providing a better user experience in terms of collaboration. A lack of this functionality could potentially ruin the user experience and chase them away from the use of the app.

Lastly, they mentioned the existence of the developer API, allowing others to create other services which leverages the current functionalities provided by Mendeley. This is quite important because it provides Mendeley with a good base from which to extend functionalities of their app, as well as to increase their number of users purely due to the fact that they provide more services. However, it would have been good if they provided some examples of how developers used the API and what additional functionalities they created.

As a student, having had to write my own essays and go online to do research for them, i'm personally having doubts as to whether i would need to use this app in the first place. When the presenter first described the process we go through when writing our own research paper, he seemed to come to the conclusion that we would eventually have to share and collaborate with others on the project. I feel that the app would be targeting a niche group of people - the academics, rather than us students, who might have to write our own papers but don't need usually need to collaborate in the first place. Perhaps it would have been good for the presenter to have mentioned the app's target group; or perhaps i'm wrong and Mendeley could have some really cool features that they provide to non-collaborative projects as well - but that it would have been nice if they presented on that point too.

One of the bad points that they described about the app was its inconsistency in features provided across different platforms. They said that this would be annoying to the user because some important features from the web app were not provided in the desktop app. I was not to clear about this because i felt that it is still reasonable for certain platforms not to provide certain services if the user was not going to use them or if providing the service on that platform just didn't make sense. Just doing a quick google search (http://libguides.rollins.edu/mendeley/webvsdesktop) and you will find that the two sets of functionalities provided is actually not one being a subset of the other. Instead the two sets overlap, whilst each having their own exclusive functionalities not provided by the other platform. While i do not exactly know if this would be a very good design to have, it definitely feels very odd to me - as the user would have to choose between the two apps to use, and swap over if they need a functionality provided in the other platform. Personally, i feel that having a single platform for this, and providing plugins/extensions to make up for the missing functionalities, would give the user a better user experience overall.

Comments

  1. I agree with you that Mendeley providing APIs for other developers to make use of their services is very beneficial and something that I am personally very impressed by. The idea of creating avenues for other developers who uses the application and find certain features lacking to make complementing applications is very well-thought out. Looking at http://dev.mendeley.com/, there's a myriad of extensions that I could leverage on if I needed something extra and Mendeley do not have to dedicate resources to finding out what is lacking and to develop solutions for that.

    I personally feel that Mendeley should look into verification services as that is my biggest gripe of the application. As pointed in their presentation, plagiarism can be committed in a service which acts like linkedIn for other academics.

    Lastly, although inconsistency across platforms is undesirable, I think there could be certain reasons why it is still so. From the venn diagram, it seems that Mendeley Desktop is catering to services that involve another application such as MS Word or EndNote and Mendeley Web caters to the user's online services and account. The OP also did mention that most features are available on both platforms which probably suggests that such a disjoint in feature set could be intentional.

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  2. Hi Zheng Wei,

    Personally, the most striking point brought up during the presentation was the possibility of identity theft and plagiarism. Especially that you have pointed out, Mendeley seems to be targeted more at academics and researchers rather than students. To me, that is a huge deal breaker. After all, aren't we taught in NUS that plagiarism is taken very seriously?

    In the academia world, most respected journals have some sort of author verification. Take arXiv for example, one of the most used journals for Mathematics research. They have a rigorous author identifier process (listed here: https://arxiv.org/help/author_identifiers) including the ability to link ORCID identifiers to their arXiv accounts.

    Certainly, no one would want their Nobel Prize-winning or Fields Medal-winning research to get stolen or get impersonated.

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    Replies
    1. To add on, I really like the point brought up about the developer API, and I agree it could have been fleshed out more in the presentation. They have pretty comprehensive documentation that is used by multiple products as listed on their page at http://dev.mendeley.com/. It is also very much in the spirit of Open Source which is just great for Mendeley to further draw inspiration from these new apps that spawn.

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  3. Hello! These are just my two cents on Mendeley and the meta critique on critique. =)

    Personally, having used Mendeley, I feel that my main usage for it is as a reference manager app as it is good for research paper citations. I feel that collaborations are a bonus feature - a vitamin rather than a painkiller. As such, I believe that the main point of Mendeley has been missed as I do not feel they are attempting to compete with Google Drive as a platform for collaboration.

    Again, from my perspective, I would feel that not having auto real time syncing would be better for me if I were the main person doing the paper. I would be really annoyed if someone added some rubbish or just messed up my formatting. So just another perspective of a benefit of not having real time syncing. So perhaps a nice suggestion would be toggleable syncing for collaboration purposes?

    I agree totally with your point on developer APIs and feel that Mendeley has to trailblaze the development efforts and start a few projects to extend Mendeley's services with the help of external developers who are also users. This can help the open source movement and help Mendeley bridge the gap between what their users want and what they envision.

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  4. Hey Zheng Wei,

    You brought up a good point about how it was unclear from the presentation on who Mendeley's target audience is. I did a quick search and it appears that not only do they target students, academics and librarians, of which I found to be particularly interesting, but also offer institutional packages (though only up to 100 collaborators). Indeed it does make a lot more sense for them to sell their product to institutions rather than to individual users, considering how its market is quite niche as what you mentioned. Personally it is unlikely that I would use such a tool as a student, unless the school offers us an account to it. Targeting institutions such as universities, would secure a huge chunk of its target user type that is, students, lecturers and researchers all together.

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  5. Hi Zheng Wei,

    I generally agree with many of your points, the lack of real-time syncing is definitely an issue for such an application these days. Personally I have swapped reminder apps because of the lack of this real-time syncing, and particularly when you are submitting work. The accident of not submitting all your sources because you did not sync could be quite disastrous.

    Whether or not I'll use it is definitely a question mark, as I do not need as many references as what a FASS student may need for example. So far it's sufficed for me to simply save all my references into Pocket, and then paste the link into a reference generator to get out the final links. While the application does sound useful, I guess I will only know after prolonged usage of it. Though as a person who does not use references often, there is great inertia to approach using a new application solely for something that is an afterthought on our projects.

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