University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

I\'m taking a virtual part in Mendeley\'s
[Hack4Knowledge](http://hack4knowledge.eventbrite.com/) event. I\'m
using this a chance to explore some ideas about building novel
interfaces to bibliographic data in Mendeley. One idea is to display a
user\'s entire library in one screen. I think the user interfaces
employed by most bibliographic software are too conservative and there
some cool things that could be done. For example, see **A fluid treemap
interface for personal digital libraries**
([doi:10.1145/1065385.1065512](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1065385.1065512),
PDF available [from
CiteSeer](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.105.1365)).  
  
One idea I\'m playing with is to display all a Mendeley user\'s papers
as a quantum treemap, with thumbnails of the papers and \"badges\"
indicating, for example, how many readers each paper has. The idea is
that at a glance you can see all your publications, and which ones are
being read the most. You can think of it as an \"ego wall\" --- a quick
way to see what others think about your work. Below is part of my
library. You can see the full treemap [here as an SVG
file](http://iphylo.org/~rpage/hack4knowledge/wall/wall.svg). Imagine
this as an iPad interface to a user\'s Mendeley library.  
  
![Wall](http://lh6.ggpht.com/-XRvRid4urqg/TfOxCbNx8PI/AAAAAAAAA58/MdTTibKBNpg/wall.png?imgmax=800){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="500" height="414"}  
  
Eventually I\'ll make this live. I\'m doing this yet as the script to
create the visualisation is slow due to the multiple requests I need to
make to get the necessary information. I have to get the list of a
user\'s papers from Mendeley, then I call the API for each paper to get
basic bibliographic details. I have to screen scrape the corresponding
paper\'s web page to get the thumbnail and the paper\'s UUID, which I
can then use to get the readership stats via Mendeley\'s API via yet
another API call. Sigh.  
  
Anyway, this is enough hacking for one day. Hope to spend some more time
on this project tomorrow.  
  
  
  


I'm taking a virtual part in Mendeley's Hack4Knowledge event. I'm using this a chance to explore some ideas about building novel interfaces to bibliographic data in Mendeley. One idea is to display a user's entire library in one screen. I think the user interfaces employed by most bibliographic software are too conservative and there some cool things that could be done.

Mendeley Hack4Knowledge: towards an "ego wall"

Inspired by the forthcoming
[Hack4Knowledge](http://hack4knowledge.eventbrite.com/) I\'ve put
together a service that enables you to assert that you are the author of
a paper using the [Mendeley API](http://dev.mendeley.com).  
  
If you are impatient, give it a try at:  
  
<http://iphylo.org/~rpage/hack4knowledge/iwrotethat/>  
  
To use it you need a Mendeley account. When you go to [I wrote
that](http://iphylo.org/~rpage/hack4knowledge/iwrotethat/) you will be
asked to connect to your Mendeley account. Once you\'ve done that, enter
the DOI or PubMed ID of a paper and, if the paper is in your Mendeley
library and flagged as a paper you\'ve authored, you should see
something like this:  
  
![Wrote](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-XXiqJSJt5MQ/Te8mlV884BI/AAAAAAAAA5s/xcrimRbmzYM/wrote.png?imgmax=800){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="500"}  
  
The site can be a little sluggish as it needs to go through all of your
publications one by one until it finds a match.  
  
**Why?**  
Imagine you have a web database that includes publications, and you want
people to join your site as users. If they have publications in your
database, you\'d like your users to be able to say \"I\'m the author of
those papers\" or, more generally, the author you have as \"Roderic D.
M. Page\" is me.  
  
One way to do this would be to enable the users to sign in to your site
using Mendeley (see my blog post [Mendeley
connect](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/09/mendeley-connect.html)).
Once they\'ve done that, the user could select a publication and say
\"that\'s mine\". How do we test this assertion? Well, if the user is
indeed the author it is likely that they will have added it to their
\"My Publications\" section in their [Mendeley
library](http://www.mendeley.com/library/). So, we can use the Mendeley
API to get a list of the author\'s publications and see whether the
publication they claim is, in fact, one of theirs.  
  
The inspiration for this came from tools like Google Analytics, where in
order to add the tool to your web site you need to convince Google that
you own the site. One way to do this is to add some text supplied by
Google to the HTML on for site, on the assumption that only you can do
this (because it\'s your site). In the same way, only you can add papers
to your Mendeley library. Of course, I\'m assuming that Mendeley users
are being trustworthy when they and papers to \"My Publications\" (i.e.,
they\'re not claiming authorship on papers they didn\'t write).  
  
**How?**  
This hack uses Mendeley\'s OAuth support (the same technology used by
Twitter and Facebook to connect to other sites) to enable you to connect
your Mendeley account to the \"I wrote that\" application (note that my
app never sees your account name or password). I use the Mendeley API
[user
authored](http://apidocs.mendeley.com/home/user-specific-methods/user-authored)
method to get a list of your publications, and [user library document
details](http://apidocs.mendeley.com/home/user-specific-methods/user-library-document-details)
to retrieve details of each publication. I then compare the DOI or PMID
you supplied with each publication, until I find one that matches. If
none matches, then I\'ve no evidence you authored that paper.  
  
**Moan**  
No post about the Mendeley API would be complete without a moan about
the state of the API. Apart from the fact that there is no function to
directly find a publication in your library by DOI or PMID (hence I have
to look at them all), there is virtually no support for retrieving any
details about the user. For example, I wanted to brighten the web page
up a little by adding a picture of the Mendeley user once they\'ve
logged in. There is no API function for this, nor a function to retrieve
an identifier or URL for the user. Hence, in order to get a picture I
screen scrape (yes, *screen scrape*) the Mendeley web page for the
reference to get the URL for the linked author of the paper, then scrape
the author\'s profile page and extract the URL for the image. This is
insane. Please, please can we have a better API?


Inspired by the forthcoming Hack4Knowledge I've put together a service that enables you to assert that you are the author of a paper using the Mendeley API. If you are impatient, give it a try at:  http://iphylo.org/~rpage/hack4knowledge/iwrotethat/  To use it you need a Mendeley account. When you go to I wrote that you will be asked to connect to your Mendeley account.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Mendeley Hack4Knowledge: towards an "ego wall"

I wrote that: asserting authorship using the Mendeley API