Is Mendeley a social network?

Online social networking for the academic world is currently a buzz topic, with millions of private equity dollars being invested in these services. Most of these networks take the ‘traditional’ Facebook-style approach, focusing on the single user and their connections, mixed in with a large dose of personal promotion. But are sites like these really integral to the research cycle?

Mendeley (and Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets), on the other hand, allows a similar social aspect for sharing research content and collaborating but at the same time address serious workflow issues in a simple and effective way. By adding Mendeley Institutional Edition to your range of library services, you can provide your researchers with a state of the art tool for organizing their personal library of references, bibliographies and PDF files. Moreover, you can upload your library holdings to the service, providing users with direct access to subscribed content. The mass of user-generated data from Mendeley is then fed back to you, providing real-time insights into the usage, sharing and publications of your researchers.

So, is Mendeley a social network? In a sense, yes. But it is much more than that:

• Powerful tool to simplify routine and workflows
• Personal library organization back-up in the cloud
• Crowdsourced filter of the world’s academic content in a single research network
• User data and analytics for libraries

At a time where libraries are under increasing pressure to demonstrate value, Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets has arrived just in time!

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