Mendeley readership

Mendeley readership is an altmetric signal derived from the number of registered users of the Elsevier-owned Mendeley reference manager who have added a given article to their personal library. Because saving a paper typically happens close to when a researcher first encounters it — often before a citing paper of their own has been drafted, reviewed, and published — Mendeley readership tends to accumulate faster than citation counts and is one of the more commonly used altmetric indicators for very recent publications that have not yet had time to be cited.

What it measures, and what it does not

Mendeley readership measures early attention and reach — how many researchers found an article worth saving — not the quality, validity, or eventual scholarly influence of the work. A user can add a paper to their library for reasons ranging from genuine research use to a passing interest, a teaching reading list, or a critique they intend to write; the count does not distinguish between these. It is also platform-specific: an article’s Mendeley readership reflects uptake among Mendeley’s own user base, not among researchers generally.

Documented biases

• Disciplinary skew. Mendeley adoption is uneven across fields; disciplines with historically higher Mendeley uptake (life sciences, social sciences, health-related fields) tend to accumulate larger readership counts for reasons unrelated to article quality, while fields with lower platform adoption are systematically under-represented, making cross-field readership comparisons unreliable without normalisation.
• Uneven adoption over time and by career stage. Because Mendeley usage itself has grown and shifted since the platform launched, readership counts for older articles reflect a different, smaller adopting population than counts for recent articles — comparing readership across publication years without accounting for this is a common analytical error.
• Weak and inconsistent correlation with eventual citation impact. Studies in the altmetrics literature have found Mendeley readership correlates with eventual citation counts more consistently than most other altmetric signals (tweets, Facebook mentions), but the relationship is modest and varies by field — readership is a leading indicator of attention, not a reliable predictor of citation impact for an individual article.

Why it is weak evidence on its own

Because of the biases above, Mendeley readership should not be used alone to evaluate a researcher, compare articles across fields, or substitute for citation-based evidence in a funding or promotion decision. It is most useful as one input in a broader altmetrics or article-level-metrics dashboard (alongside PlumX, Altmetric Attention Score, and citation-based indicators such as the Relative Citation Ratio), read in context against a comparable baseline, and interpreted as evidence of early researcher attention rather than as a standalone impact score — consistent with the responsible-metrics position taken by DORA on single-indicator evaluation generally.

References

• Altmetrics literature on Mendeley readership as a citation-count precursor and its disciplinary variability (see e.g. Bornmann and colleagues’ altmetrics-validity studies; Zahedi, Costas & Wouters on Mendeley reader-count coverage).