ReaderMeter: what's in a name?

Dario Taraborelli has released ReaderMeter, an elegant app built on top of the Mendeley API. You enter an author's name and it summarises that authorship's readership in Mendeley. The app provides some summary statistics (mine are shown below), and if you click on the horizontal bar corresponding to a paper, you can see a visualisation of who is reading your paper, including a nice map.

As ever with author names, there are issues of people's name having more than one spelling. In Mendeley I'm known as Roderic D. M. Page, R. D. M. Page, Rod Page, Roderic Page, Roderic D. M. Page, and doubtless some others. Searching ReaderMeter using different spellings of my name gives different results. There are various approaches to tackling this problem, I've touched on one approach earlier.

However, there's a different way to tackle this problem in the context of apps like ReaderMeter, because if you're a Mendeley user you can assert that you are the author of a paper (these papers live in your "My Publications" collection). Using Mendeley's API, an app could retrieve this list of publications (providing the user gave it access), and we could compute readership statistics from the set of articles "known" to be authored (leaving aside the issue of people gaming the system by spuriously claiming authorship). In this way the app relies on the default behaviour of Mendeley users - uploading and self-identifying the articles they've written.

Implementing a feature like this posses two problems. The first is access to a user's data. Mendeley's API supports OAuth, so it could be done in such a way that only the account's user could authorise the app to access this list. The app could store the fact that the user has verified that the list of publications. Think of it as a bit like Amazon's Real Name™ feature.

The other obstacle is Mendeley's API, which returns readership statistics for public documents (i.e., those in the central aggregation). At present, using the API there is no way to link the global id for a Mendeley reference (e.g., ae7dd6a0-6d09-11df-936c-0026b95e484c) with the local id (e.g., 3582682802) that reference has in a user's collection, unless we resort to trying to match articles by searching by identifiers or article titles. If the API exposed these links, apps like ReaderMeter could become even more powerful (and personalised).

Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: iBooks

Apple's iBooks app is an ePub and PDF reader, and one could write a lengthy article about its interface. However, in the context of these posts on visualising the scientific article there's one feature that has particularly struck me. When reading a book that cited other literature the citations are hyper-links: click on one and iBooks forwards you (via the page turning effect) to the reference in the book's bibliography. This can be a little jarring (one minute you're reading the page, next you're in the bibliography), but to help maintain context the reference is preceded by the snippet of text in which it is cited:

To make this concrete, here's an example from Clarky Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus."

In the body of the text (left) the text "notes in his book The Success of Open Source" (which I've highlighted in blue) is a hyper-link. Click on it, and we see the source of the citation (right), together with the text that formed the hyper-link. This context helps remind you why you wanted to follow up the citation, and also provides the way back to the text: click on the context snippet and you're taken back to the original page.

Providing context for a citation is a nice feature, and there are various ways to do this. For example, the Elsevier Life Sciences Challenge entry by Wan et al. ("Supporting browsing-specific information needs: Introducing the Citation-Sensitive In-Browser Summariser", doi:10.1016/j.websem.2010.03.002, see also an earlier version on CiteSeer) takes a different approach. Rather than provide local context for a citation in an article (a la iBooks), Wan et al. provide context-sensitive summaries of the reference cited to help the the reader judge whether it's worth her time to fetch the reference and read it.

Both of these approaches suggest that we could be a lot more creative about how we display and interact with citations when viewing an article.

Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: Mendeley

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Perhaps the key difference between Mendeley and the other apps is that Mendeley is cloud-based, in that the bibliography exists on Mendeley's servers, as well as locally on your desktop, iPad, or iPhone. Hence, whereas the Nature and PLoS apps consume a web stream of documents, and Papers enables you to sync collections between desktop and iOS devices, Mendeley syncs to central web server. At present this appears to be done over HTTPS. Mendeley recently released an API, which I've discussed at length. Mendeley's app doesn't use this API, which is a pity because if it did I suspect the API would be getting the love it needs from Mendeley's developers.

Like Papers, the Mendley app uses a split view, where the left-hand panel is used for navigation.

You can drill down to lists of references, and display basic details about an article.

PDF
The Mendeley app is a PDF viewer, but whereas the PLoS app has page turning, and the Papers app scrolls pages from left to right, the Mendeley app displays PDF pages vertically (which is probably the more natural way to scroll through content on the iPad):

Summary
It's clearly early days for the Mendeley app, but it's worth noting two of its most obvious limitations. Firstly, it depends entirely on the user's existing Mendeley bibliography - you can't add to this using the app, it's simply a viewer. Compare this to Papers which can access a suite of search engines from which you can download new papers (albeit with some limitations, for example the Papers iPad app doesn't seem to support extracting metadata via XMP, unlike the desktop version). Secondly, despite Mendeley having as one of its goals being a

research network that allows you to keep track of your colleagues' publications, conference participations, awards etc., and helps you discover people with research interests similar to yours

the Mendeley app lacks any social features, apart from sharing by email(!). I think designing social interactions in bibliographic apps will be a challenge. For an example of what social reading can look like, check out Flipboard.