University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![Screen_shot_2010-08-30_at_22.37.31.png](http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/TH0CspAEenI/AAAAAAAAAv0/Ydc-15rt4u4/Screen_shot_2010-08-30_at_22.37.31.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="132" height="132" style="float:right;"}[Dario
Taraborelli](http://nitens.org/taraborelli) has released
[ReaderMeter](http://readermeter.org/), an elegant app built on top of
the Mendeley API. You enter an author\'s name and it summarises that
authorship\'s readership in Mendeley. The app provides some summary
statistics ([mine are shown
below](http://readermeter.org/Page.Roderic%20D%20M)), and if you click
on the horizontal bar corresponding to a paper, you can see a
visualisation of who is reading your paper, including a nice map.  
  

::: {style="text-align:center"}
![meter.png](http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/TH0CtUAFklI/AAAAAAAAAv4/oxJ8pCYQoEE/meter.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="400"}
:::

  
As ever with author names, there are issues of people\'s name having
more than one spelling. In Mendeley I\'m known as Roderic D. M. Page, R.
D. M. Page, Rod Page, Roderic Page, Roderic D. M. Page, and doubtless
some others. Searching ReaderMeter using different spellings of my name
gives different results. There are various approaches to tackling this
problem, I\'ve touched on one approach
[earlier](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/01/equivalent-author-names.html).  
  
However, there\'s a different way to tackle this problem in the context
of apps like ReaderMeter, because if you\'re a Mendeley user you can
assert that you are the author of a paper (these papers live in your
\"My Publications\" collection). Using Mendeley\'s API, an app could
retrieve this list of publications (providing the user gave it access),
and we could compute readership statistics from the set of articles
\"known\" to be authored (leaving aside the issue of people gaming the
system by spuriously claiming authorship). In this way the app relies on
the default behaviour of Mendeley users - uploading and self-identifying
the articles they\'ve written.  
  
Implementing a feature like this posses two problems. The first is
access to a user\'s data. Mendeley\'s API supports OAuth, so it could be
done in such a way that only the account\'s user could authorise the app
to access this list. The app could store the fact that the user has
verified that the list of publications. Think of it as a bit like
Amazon\'s [Real
Name™](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=14279641)
feature.  
  
The other obstacle is Mendeley\'s API, which returns readership
statistics for public documents (i.e., those in the central
aggregation). At present, using the API there is no way to link the
global id for a Mendeley reference (e.g.,
ae7dd6a0-6d09-11df-936c-0026b95e484c) with the local id (e.g.,
3582682802) that reference has in a user\'s collection, unless we resort
to trying to match articles by searching by identifiers or article
titles. If the API exposed these links, apps like
[ReaderMeter](http://readermeter.org/) could become even more powerful
(and personalised).  
  


Dario Taraborelli has released ReaderMeter, an elegant app built on top of the Mendeley API. You enter an author's name and it summarises that authorship's readership in Mendeley. The app provides some summary statistics (mine are shown below), and if you click on the horizontal bar corresponding to a paper, you can see a visualisation of who is reading your paper, including a nice map.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

ReaderMeter: what's in a name?