This article was taken from the March issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Science is like music: you're defined by who you like*.*A key part of a researcher's job is to amass hundreds of papers, citing them in your own work to back up your thesis and showing how your research is grounded in existing science. However, the cliché that the scientist's office is in perpetual chaos exists for a reason: organising that much paper can be a huge task. It's a problem that London-based start-up Mendeleyis trying to solve. "When [30-year-old co-founder] Jan Reichelt and I were doing our PhDs, we were struggling to wrangle all of our research," says co-founder Victor Henning, 29. "So we wondered if we could write a program to extract all of the metadata from a PDF."
Henning, Reichelt and third co-founder Paul Föckler, 29, saw the answer in a technology previously used for music: scrobbling (where by a media player automatically logs tracks and tailors future song selections). The result: a server-based system with a desktop client and a web bookmarklet that automatically extracts a document's metadata (such as title, author, keywords and the papers that it itself cites).
At this point, what Mendeley gives you is a searchable database of your research, along with a bibliography-generating tool. But its killer feature comes from the collaborative filtering technology also seen in Last.fm. Because the system knows what topics you're interested in -- it learns more about you each time you upload another paper -- it can connect you to people with similar interests, and point out papers you may have missed.
The Last.fm connection doesn't end there. Mendeley's chairman and main investor, Stefan Glänzer, was previously "chairman über alles" at the music site. And, just as Last.fm does for music and Amazon Recommendations does for books, Mendeley, by operating at web scale, can tell you about the state of your field in much greater detail. It also keeps track in real time of which papers are cited by whom, and can help you spot rising stars and trends in scientific research as they happen. Who is the most popular researcher in your field this morning? Mendeley can, for the first time, tell you.
As with all successful social networks, Mendeley has seen immense growth since it launched: the database doubles in size every ten weeks, and by the end of 2009 contained references to more than eight million scholarly papers. The service is free, and will remain so -- revenue comes from labs that wish to keep their internal research secret, or from researchers who pay for extra space on the server.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
