Sunday 26 June 2011

Mendeley: Measuring OA rates

Having talked about Mendeley's OA deposit rates in my last blog post, I thought it worthwhile to check how representative my chosen discipline (Computer Science) was. Rather than download the entire community for each other discipline, I have performed a quick and dirty sample of some of the available literature in each discipline using the search function. Each Mendeley search result offers the option of saving the PDF (if available) to your library, so it is a simple matter to wget some search results and grep for PDFs.

The table below shows the results of this procedure for 11 disciplines (two illustrative keywords each). The "available PDFs" column records the number of PDFs offered on the first page of the search results (each page contains 200 results); the total number of results shows the relative coverage of the topic in Mendeley.

Computer Science appears to be in the 5-10% range of OA (18 or 11 PDFs out of a page of 200 results) which does seem to be just about average. Social Science, Medicine, Health Science, Economics and the Humanities appear to have fewer PDFs and Maths and Physics appear to have rather more.

Search term
Discipline
Available PDFs
Total Results
chromatography
Chem
10
14260
crystallography
Chem
27
4921
JAVA
CS
18
848
software
CS
11
15185
geology
Earth
36
4180
hydrodynamic
Earth
40
2853
econometrics
Economics
13
565
microeconomics
Economics
5
88
biodiversity
Env
14
4668
climate
Env
14
13003
nursing
Health
6
10723
palliative
Health
6
1978
archaeology
Hum
6
1730
Foucault
Hum
11
248
algebra
Math
101
4424
cohomology
Math
171
525
cancer
Med
11
52315
pharmacology
Med
4
62285
quasar
Phys
127
556
telescope
Phys
101
2347
cognition
Psy
11
18805
schizophrenia
Psy
17
4055
criminology
SocSci
2
154
sociology
SocSci
2
2005

2 comments:

  1. Where is engineering and its various branches?

    ReplyDelete
  2. One question to clarify for those of us not yet using Mendeley much- for these rates of pdf presence is there any declaration or review that these pdfs are actually available under some form of OA licence (as opposed to posted without regard for IPR)?

    ReplyDelete