What are Mendeley Readers?

Mendeley Readers is a research statistic which counts the sum of unique Mendeley users who have added a given research output to their Mendeley library.

Mendeley Reader counts have been positively correlated with future citation impact in a number of studies, including Li & Thelwall, 2012opens in new tab/window; Zahedia, Costas, and Wouters, 2014opens in new tab/window; Thelwall, 2018opens in new tab/window.

Professor Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton finds that “Mendeley Readers typically appear at least a year before citations due to delays between other researchers reading a paper and their new study being published” (sourceopens in new tab/window).

In this way, Mendeley Reader counts can help you to predict the impact that a recently-published article will have and is a useful indicator for evaluating the context of a journal article.

We caution that Mendeley Reader counts are inferred from crowdsourced data and Elsevier does not currently endorse using it as a direct measure of research impact.