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Social Networking for Scientists: Mendeley
Among scientists-bloggers, the new buzz word is Mendeley: a social networking platform for scientists (Ricardo Vidal, Sylvie Noël, Misha Lemeshko, Michael Kuhn, …). The site is barely getting started and is still in early beta, there are bugs and limitations. However, the London-based has funding and a solid staff.
Their vision statement is compelling:
Mendeley is free social software for managing and sharing research papers. It is also a Web 2.0 site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. To achieve our long-term vision of a “Last.fm for research“, we’re working with the former founding engineers of Skype and Last.fm‘s former chairman.
Last night I created a profile. I got tired of entering my papers and I stopped entering them around 2005-2006. If you have 100 published papers, you are going to swear a lot. It is sad that you cannot just link to your existing pub. list (such as arxiv.org).
Where I see the potential is in the social networking. It seems that all of the scientific networking I do is “hand-crafted”. I am hoping for more!