UPDATED Research: “Networks of Reader And Country Status: An Analysis of Mendeley Reader Statistics”

The link below is to a recent UPDATE (Version 3) to a working paper that was first posted in April 2015.
Title
Networks of Reader and Country Status: An Analysis of Mendeley Reader Statistics
Authors
Robin Haunschild
Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research
Lutz Bornmann
Division for Science and Innovation Studies, Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society
Loet Leydesdorff
University of Amsterdam
Source
via arXiv
Abstract

The number of papers published in journals indexed by the Web of Science core collection is steadily increasing. In recent years, nearly two million new papers were published each year; somewhat more than one million papers when primary research articles are considered only. Sophisticated and compact bibliometric methods have to be applied in order to obtain an overview. One popular method is a network-based analysis.
In this study, we analyze Mendeley readership data of a set of 1,133,224 articles and 64,960 reviews with publication year 2012 to generate three networks: (1) The network based on disciplinary affiliations points out similarities of and differences in readerships of papers. (2) The status group network shows which status groups (e.g. students, lecturers, or professors) commonly read and bookmark papers. (3) The country network focusses on global readership patterns: It visualizes similar and different reading patterns of papers at the country level. With these networks we explore the usefulness of readership data for networking.

Direct to Full Text Article, Version 3 (26 pages; PDF)
Other Versions
Version 1 (19 pages)
Version 2 (24 pages)

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