I would like to ask the forum what to think of the new bibliographic and social networking tools that have recently been introduced. The most recent development in this respect seems to be Mendeley which is often said to be aiming to become a kind of „last.fm for scientific papers“, i.e., a service recommending papers that might be interesting to you, depending on your own bibliography that you have made public to the service. It reminds me of the iTunes Store Genius feature which does just that in terms of music tracks. Apart from that, Mendeley offers a kind of social web service for scientists who can search for colleages working in the same field, even on subjects of minor interest where it it hard to find out who else might be working on the same or on a closely related subject somewhere else.
Taking part in Mendeley requires you to register for the service, and then you’ll have to upload your bibliography, or at least the part of it you would like to make public. And that’s the decisive point to me because when I publish my bibliography I tell the rest of the academic world outside what I already know, and, vice versa, what I probably don’t know which means that you have to put a lot of trust into the system and the way other scientists competing with you in the same field will use your research data.
I can only speak of my own subject, the law of social security in Germany. If I know your bibliography, I know more of less what will be the content of the paper you are writing. Thus, it is highly recommended not to communicate your list of references too early because this may quite easily help your scientific competitors to advance faster than you, potentially rendering years of work useless because in the end you cannot prove that the idea you had developed was originally yours if a competitor manages to publish it first.
I suggest that this will be a major hindrance to the introduction of such social media tools in the humanities because searching an iTunes-Genius kind of database and recommendation system is different from searching an ordinary library catalogue that is much more „neutral“ to all users.
Presently, I am testing Mendeley for use in my field of research which, in Mendeley terms, is denoted as „Law – Employment and Social Security Law“, and my experience is a rather mixed bag. There are, of course, quite some people appearing in the Mendeley database which fit into this or that tag I’m searching for, but as I am a German lawyer this will not lead me any further. Most participants at Mendeley are still coming from the English-speaking part of the world, and most are not lawyers. This may change sometime, of course, but I doubt that it will, given the problem of plagiarism mentioned above that may quickly ruin your academic career if you do not pay anough attention in protecting your current research projects.
However, I would like to ask what people from other fields of research think of such tools? Do you use Mendeley, or Bibsonomy, or Zotero Groups, etc.? And if so, what kind of information do you share in public?
As an overview of Mendeley and more such services I still would like to give you some URLs for your reference, providing you a general introduction to the topic.
http://www.mendeley.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/sep/16/last-fm-mendeley-victor-keegan
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
Forenbeitrag in der Xing Gruppe „Scientific/ academic publishing“, 14. November 2009.
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As you’ve noticed, all material you upload is private unless you specifically put it in a „public collection“. This means that the world only sees what you’d like them to see. As you note, showing too much might sometimes be risky, but let me point out that there’s a benefit to be found by introducing colleagues to important papers and thereby showing yourself to be an authority.
I don’t know how it works in the legal profession, but in the sciences, „scooping“ such as you mention turns out to be fairly rare. Establishing new collaborations is seen as more important and more difficult, and it’s here that Mendeley offers much promise, while continuing to give you as much privacy as you need.
Thank you very much for your reply. I have handed it on to the Xing forum I had previously posted my text to to let other participants know. Of course, I will have a look at Mendeley as it develops as a service.