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 |