
Mendeley comes out of stealth with its "Last.fm for academic research" - wheels
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/mendeleys-klingon-battle-cruiser-de-cloaks-in-london-with-the-lastfm-for-academia/
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Maro
It's pretty sad that we (researchers, academics) need a startup and $2M for
this. You could do it for free by adding some basic voting and commenting
features to arxiv.

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ninguem2
Could somebody explain what this is without the "last.fm" analogy, since I
don't have the foggiest idea what "last.fm" is.

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maximilian
When you use Last.fm and install their software thingy, it tracks what music
you are playing on your computer. (I think its called "scrobbling" or
something).

I think the analogy is that their software will show what papers you have on
your computer, which would indicate that you have read them and might
reference them.

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ninguem2
Thanks. Color me paranoid, but I would never install a program that looks at
my HD and reports aspects of its contents to someone else.

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wheels
I just tried it out and the interface is a bit clunky, but I like the idea.
Indexing was far from perfect, and haven't tried out recommendations yet.

However, in general, the idea of doing passive (meaning, implicitly gathered)
collaborative filtering / recommendations on research is something that I find
interesting, being a recommender systems mensch and all. This is one of the
problems I'd like to see solved as a way of pulling in research that's in my
field that I'm not yet familiar with, so I hope it works out for them.

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dantheman
They haven't implemented the killer feature yet... the ability to highlight
and annotate documents, and share those highlights. For instance, you read a
paper and find some portion interesting, I want see that portion and then if I
need more info I can read the whole thing.

Also, I want them to integrate with the university library system like google
does so that I can get authenticated access to the documents.

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icey
This looks pretty cool; but the name first made me think of Mendeleyev and
Mengele. The first one's probably not too bad, but the second one might create
the wrong mental picture when you're talking about research.

Of course, I'm not great with naming domains myself, so maybe I'm the only one
who would think that.

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idiopathic
I think it's supposed to be Gregor Mendel, the Belgian monk who did
experiments on peas to identify heritable traits. Pair a tall bean with
another tall bean, you get a long offspring bean. This is where the phrase
mendelian genetics comes from, and that's what I thought they named the
company after.

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carterschonwald
doesn't work for either AMS journals or front.arxiv You may as well just use
evernote's webclipping service, 'cause honestly if you're doing research and
you don't know what your target community is, nor do you know who to ask for
good papers to read, you probably shouldn't be doing research in that area

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zackattack
Independent observation: somebody really should provide a free database of
academic papers. I'm graduating soon and not looking forward to paying
ridiculous $29.95 a la carte fees.

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ninguem2
In some areas, it is common for the researchers to put their papers up on
their web pages or on the ArXiv. Alternatively, just write to the author. They
will send you a copy.

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wheels
...or write to anyone who is at a university. Skype / IRC are my standard
mechanisms for such. I can usually get most papers inside of 10 minutes by
pinging a couple people.

