Mendeley searches in Webometric Analyst
***New August 2021: Mendeley queries do not seem to work any longer. Instead Mendeley only searches by DOI. The notes below are updated to reflect this change.
Mendeley.com is an academic reference web site, similar to CiteULike, Connotea and Zotero. It is free to join and members can list the academic publications that they have read. The Mendeley is useful to research the popularity of academic articles by counting how often they have been registered by Mendeley users. To use the Mendeley tab, a list of articles is needed. The input for Mendeley in Webometric Analyst can either be a list of DOIs, one per line, or a list of article records in tab-delimited format, one column of which contains DOIs.
When you have the file with DOIs, start Webometric Analyst, select the Mendeley tab and click Search For Publications.
Select the file with DOIs, answer the questions and, when requested, login to your Mendeley account or your institutional Elsevier logon (if you have one).
When taken to a webpage with URL starting lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk, copy the URL to Webometric Analyst and click OK.
Wait for the program to finish.
The searches produce several different output files in case you want to do a non-standard analysis. The main ones are these:
[original name]_pubsFound.txt - a complete list of all publications matching the searches.
[original name]_pubsFound_corr85.txt - ignore this one - probable correct matches for the queries, after checking DOI, title, authors, journal name for matches.
[original name]_pubsFound_top85.txt - the readers for the single best search match.
[original name]_pubsFound_total85.txt - the sum of the readers for all search results that seem to be correct. [use this one as the main results file]
***In the results, -1 in the reader column indicates that the record was not found in Mendeley (so it is essentially a 0). In contrast, 0 in the reader column indicates that the record was found in Mendeley but it did not have any readers.
Example input files for DOI searches, and PubMed ID searches - you can have these searches in addition to, or instead of, the above text-based searches.
Example of an input file with Scopus data that can be used for DOI searches.
Converting from Web of Science records
If you have a list of articles downloaded from the Web of Science in standard format then you may be able to convert this into a set of queries for Webometric Analyst by using the Convert Web of Science Text Outputs button.
See the Mendeley-related papers here for ideas for Mendeley research projects: http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/mtpublications.html#webcitationanalysis
Here is the official Mendeley API documentation.