Assessing the Impact of Publications Saved by Mendeley Users: Is There Any Different Pattern Among Users?

The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact of publications read (saved) by the different users in Mendeley in order to explore the extent to which their readership counts correlate with their citation indicators. The potential of filtering highly cited papers by Mendeley readerships and its different users have been also explored. For the analysis of the users, we have considered the information of the top three Mendeley ‘users’ reported by the Mendeley. Our results show that publications with Mendeley readerships tend to have higher citation and journal citation scores than publications without readerships. ‘Biomedical & health sciences’ and ‘Mathematics and computer science’ are the fields with respectively the most and the least readership activity in Mendeley. PhD students have the highest density of readerships per publication and Lecturers and Librarians have the lowest across all the different fields. Our precision-recall analysis indicates that in general, for publications with at least one reader in Mendeley, the capacity of readerships of filtering highly cited publications is better than (or at least as good as) Journal Citation Scores. We discuss the important limitation of Mendeley of only reporting the top three readers and not all of them in the potential development of indicators based on Mendeley and its users.