FailProduct: Mendeley

By Shana | Published: January 19, 2010
Trapped in Hyde Park
Image by quinn.anya via Flickr

This is one of those products which makes me so sad.  It actually could be a really useful product.

As soon as I saw it, I realized why college is so depressing when it comes to research.  it’s because no matter what you do, the stuff out there, sucks.

Part of this is problems involving different fields of research: While generally, pretty much everyone cites one of two ways (MLA or Chicago), especially on the undergraduate level*, if one ever decided to go look up the amount of ways to cite primary and secondary material in say, The Chicago Manual of Style, one would know that just a paper is never enough when it comes to citing.  From there, there are four ways to stick your cites into your paper. Then you have to deal with different kinds of material.  It’s why the Chicago Manual, 15th edition, aka the orange brick, has two chapters on the subject.  Citing a Musical Score is not the same as citing a paper from Nature.  Depending on the length of your paper, of course…

Now trying to gather and manage all this stuff is a pain.  Across different disciplines, forget about it.  Someone like me, actually might be citing all of this.  Or trying to.  Or managing all of this information (Major students in my department have been told to read everything from hard core bio textbook to look up articles about how charts good charts are made for their theses.  I realize that if I want to get really good at art, I would need to graduate, get a job, and study…math, statistics, and comp sci because of the kind of art I’m interested in….whereas other people I know would be studying totally different material….)

I actually had Mendely installed (because I tried to register for everything Le Web ’09 offered that was explained in English).  I’m part of their prime demographic (I’m a student on leave doing a bachelor’s thesis work in Art, and I am expected to defend a thesis of artwork through actual research.  That’s pretty normal where I’m from due to class schedules versus requirements.)

I realized I couldn’t figure how to make the damn program work; How was I supposed to organize books that weren’t there, papers in the process of being written, movies that need to be annonated, and artwork that needs to be relooked at (if I am so lucky)?  Before sticking in my own stuff.  Delicious actually does a better job for me right now, for the most part.

That just annoyed me.  I realized it wasn’t going to be a me thing either: How would someone import their lab notes (primary research) or other sorts of primary documents, particuarly rare ones?  And then share them?  Primary documents are everything when doing research: how else are you going to check that what you are doing is the right thing?

Those lack are a total fail.  If your layout can’t make clear what is going on within 5 minutes, students will ignore you.  I also can’t beleive I de-installed.  I’m tempted to re-install to figure out what happened, but that may be a waste of my time.  I have reading to do, you know…

 

(I never de-install, I mean I never de-install.  And therefore, I’m sad.)

 

Sorry guys.

 

 

*In case you are curious, I cite Chicago.  This means I’m an intellectual snob. :)  Actually, the real reason is I went there.  And if you like the photo, it is from one of my favorite Hangouts on Campus, the Regenstein Library. (Go A-Level!)  Someone actually is documenting all the grafitti there, some of which is quite awesome, because it is an awesome library.  Go take a look…(also here is her book)

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  • drgunn
    Hi, It's @mrgunn from Twitter. Thanks for giving Mendeley a try. If I'm reading you right, what you're saying is that metadata isn't available for many types of academic output, so how could Mendeley organize these things?

    If that's your issue, you're quite right - Mendeley can only organize items which have been published and have been issued some identifying handles by which to unambiguously cite them. That's the purpose of Mendeley, so I expect you would find frustration trying to use it with material that's not published and citeable. However, there is a way to get a unique identifier assigned to your work, even in a prepublication state. Pre-print archives such as Nature Precedings and Arxiv.org allow researchers to submit prepublication copies of their work and in return, the archive gives the item a DOI such that it can be cited. The purpose of this is to get a head-start on discussion around the work, prior to official publication. Additionally, many libraries have institutional repositories for their content, which support a wide range of media types. I'm not the expert on IRs, so if you don't mind, I'll share this post with a community on scholars on Friendfeed and they can tell you more about this.

    Of course, this will only work for your own academic output (you can't submit others' work to an archive) but if I'm reading your issue properly, this is a problem that has to be solved on a societal level, so it's worth raising the profile of these things.

    Do I understand your issue properly, or have I totally missed the point?
  • Correct. Or are published in multiple ways. or are being used in ways that are unexpected.

    For me this is less about media types in a library then how a very wide group of users is going to interact with an object (Mendeley) that is supposed to handle these media types seamlessly. Often undergraduates (and some graduate students at the very beginning stages), have to learn what a DOI is and probably don't want to. They just want to do their research in peace and quiet with their friends around, and get it done as quickly as possible...They want to have something to show to their advisers friends and colleagues quickly but not shoddily. The fact that there are so many issues involving media types and their uses is a long term hindrance. it also is a hindrance that there are many types of people doing research in academics: not everyone is a researcher, some people are students. Not everyone does the sciences, some people do humanities. And yet everyone's research overlaps. At the end of the day, everyone just wants to be productive.

    I also have expansive views on metadata: in some ways metadata is socially built. This might be due to the fact that I'm an art student with a theory oriented background. One of the questions of organizing is how is the thing going to be used- different fields have different standards and different understandings of what it means "to use.

    This work by Mark Beasley is going to be cite-worthy for both a comp-sci student, an art student, a philosophy student, and an art student. It may in fact have a DOI (I don't know, the gallery system, the post gallery system, and the museum system are actually a little beyond me: they do maintain extensive archives though for research purposes, having done some research) Chicago Manual does have ways of citing (though I am not looking up how to cite this, and then bothering them to see if it is absolutely perfect). One of the theoretical advantages of something like Mendeley would be to showcase in my own research (I'm an art student, yet I do do research, I have to cite this guy and my "intellectual ancestor" in critiques as much as a friend of mine has to cite results of plastic surgery) in planning stages. I would want to work cross-disciplines: I find this advantageous. A DOI, while helpful, isn't going to explain to me how a wide variety of people are using that one piece of material. That should be part of the surrounding, developing, metadata experience. A totally social one I assume. Anyway, factually, a large amount of material has to be available to a large amount of people whose roles overlap and it isn't going to be clear how when the material is first published (or pre-published).

    So basically I dislike it because I want to see early research notes up, and I don't think there are ways to unambiguously cite in terms of metadata. Unless you want to get into an argument with me about how certain fields of economics are borrowing from studies of fluid mechanics in physics...and then I know of artists who borrow from them ...and then how do you put that in the metadata?
  • drgunn
    Shana, I think you're exactly right that the initial stage of academic
    work, pre-publishing, is the point at which it's hard for people to
    connect. Mendeley could ease this process by automatically submitting
    academic work to the pre-print archive and automatically getting the
    metadata back. We're in discussion with repositories on how to make
    this work and be seamless for the user.

    The key to keeping an accurate scholarly record, be it art history or
    cancer research, is, as you note, being able to trace the intellectual
    history of ideas. Different fields do have different ways of
    identifying individual works, but they all have their own way of
    uniquely identifying them. Mendeley is, in fact, flexible enough to
    support different media types, so as long as the information is there,
    whether user-entered or looked up in a database, it can be used in
    further scholarly writing and communication.

    This is how you tell the relationship of early research in context of
    your current work, and also exactly how you unambiguously cite works.
    Whether it's a economist, an physicist, or an artist, it all gets
    recorded this way - via citations that become part of the scholarly
    record.

    Does this speak to your concerns?
  • It's not whether it can cite well (of course it can- Microsoft word now can
    extract? format? cites for me I think). It's what people will do with it no
    matter the background. There are lots of different types of people at a
    university. You want to keep the "huh?" at a minimum. (They give courses
    on refworks, why? It's something that should work in an obvious fashion...)

    when it comes to pre-publishing (or even non-publishing, how many
    undergraduates do you see walking around with journal articles?), my
    reaction to all of this is that you just give it out to a bunch of students
    and researchers in different stages of their academics careers and see what
    they do with it. They're sort of part of the academic cannon, and
    truthfully, I've seen plenty of good ideas come from people not published
    (all very unpolished..who cares though? give them the credit anyway) Are
    they citing flowers? Books about flowers? How fractals look like flowers?
    What do they want to do next? What do they actually do next? what will
    make this process easier? What will happen when we share it all? Should we
    share it all? How do you align those interests? How will this change the
    university environment- it will change once you start seeing a huge body of
    material that is sort of researchable about core classes that are common
    between university students.

    A freshie writing his/her first paper is going to react very different than
    a post-doc. Both are going using this in very legitimate ways. (Though I
    can imagine the first college paper being very scary, mine was) Making the
    change that people have lots of research going on that we don't talk about
    en mass and now we do will radicalize the University system. And
    universities are environments where they won't pay for something unless the
    freshie and the post-doc can use whatever on a (somewhat) equal playing
    field. I also can imagine it will not make large universities happy that
    suddenly there is an influx of half finished and unpublished research on a
    huge variety of material that could compete with the "standard" university
    system and still be peer reviewed.

    As a result, I would say you would need to be very focused on your audience.
    I think also you need to have one big breakthrough come out of someone who
    uses Mendeley and who clearly thinks Mendeley is a cause. (viral mass
    adoption in universities, because in universities, people gossip about all
    sorts of things....like Wendy Doniger... and their research...it's an odd
    lifestyle :) ) This is clearly not for an audience that is doing in process
    research. It's not for an audience just starting to do research. It might
    be great for late stage research. Definitely good for the sciences. Might
    be good for late stage humanities research. Forget me trying to explain why
    I have what I have saved. (Art students are notoriously odd...I keep
    everything from stock charts to plants to books on feminism)

    I'm going to pass this on on facebook and see what I can get back in terms
    of what people think of this asa product, irrelevant of what I think...
  • drgunn
    Shana - Thanks for passing the word along. It's certainly appreciated, as our your comments here. I think you've hit the nail on the head talking about people adopting Mendeley as a cause. In fact, we've just started recruiting campus ambassadors to join the cause, and we're only accepting those who believe in what we're doing.

    Nominations are welcome, by the way.
  • Take a look at the photo. It's from the Regenstein Library. Taken by an
    employee and former student named Quinn Dombrowski. She works in the
    library for Network Services (http://nsit.uchicago.edu/) in emerging
    technologies, for what looks like work in the
    humanities, Particularly Slavic studies. She happens to like photographing
    the graffiti, mostly because we have interesting library graffiti. If I had
    to hedge- she would know who is who in the library and could tell you what
    to do.

    http://www.quinndombrowski.com/

    If not her, I would tell you talk to Bill Sterner, who manages the MacLab.
    (aka the main computer lab for everyone, and the official comp sci lab of
    the school)
    http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/people/sterner

    He probably knows what is on all of the most popular machines by heart. His
    employees definitely do :) (and they are wonderful people besides)

    That being said, this is not the friendly way to go about doing this. I
    can't say I know either person well or at all (I pulled from a class of Prof
    Sterner's, and I never met Ms. Dombrowski)
    Last resource is to talk to CAPS (career)- they have listings for brand
    boosters. If you can provide a compelling reason- they'll stick you on.
    https://caps.uchicago.edu/
  • drgunn
    Thanks very much for those suggestions, Shana!
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