Are Mendeley's public groups effective aggregators of high-value papers? An analysis based on paper readerships

Abstract

At present, Mendeley is the only academic social networking service that allows users to form interest groups. Sharing papers relevant to the group theme is one of the major activities of group members. In this study, we focused on Mendeley’s public groups, interested in their effectiveness in aggregating high-value academic papers. The value of the papers can be indicated with their readerships, a popular altmetric. Do the papers shared in groups have higher readerships than the ones that are not shared in groups? We obtained significant results for all of the 24 Mendeley disciplines examined. However, disciplinary differences exist: natural sciences and engineering present relatively higher levels of paper readership disparity than humanities and social sciences. Our findings suggest that exploring groups’ paper collections is a useful alternative method of information seeking, especially in natural sciences and engineering.