ARC: Connections: ELMAR: Posting

Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The site has now launched into public beta with the support of Last.fm‘s chairman and Skype‘s former founding engineers.

Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively.

Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders and a doctoral student in marketing at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

The full press release is available here.