Mendeley Readership Impact of Academic Articles of Iran

Introduction By means of formal citation analysis, although scientific impact of research was measured, so far other influential aspects of research such as readership and educational impact was simply ignored. Now online reference management tools such as Mendeley allow creating collections of digital paper holdings, and collaborative filtering of scientific publications, whose data proved to predict future formal citations (Li, Thelwall & Giustini, 2012). Mendeley metric obtains credit by measuring readership, for majority of users who add papers to their Mendeley libraries to read, although they may save them to cite or use in professional, educational, or teaching activities (Mohammadi, Thelwall & Kousha, in press). Mendeley readership also has potentials to present knowledge flow across fields (Mohammadi & Thelwall, 2012), and popularity of papers among users from within various countries (Maflahi & Thelwall, 2014) and academic career stages (Haustein & Larivière, 2014). Although this metric is studied for patterns of impact in various fields, its application for research impact assessment practice in developing countries is less known. Therefore, this research assessed WoS (Web of Science of Thomson Scientific) publications of Iran (20002012) for users in Mendeley across four broader research areas. In addition, career stages and nationalities of Mendeley users are also analysed for patterns of interested users in papers. The results may help to understand how and to what extent Mendeley readership metric is applicable to assess publications of authors in Iran.