Scopus, Elsevier's abstract and citation database, has announced a new feature that will show users the Mendeley readership statistics of a specific article. The beta version of Mendeley readership statistics went live on March 7, 2014. This new feature shows how many times Mendeley users have downloaded a specific article to their libraries. Additionally, it also shows a demographic breakdown by discipline, academic status and country of origin.
These statistics appear on the Scopus Documents Details pages for which at least one Mendeley user has saved the document in their collection – if no one has saved it, the feature will not appear to Scopus users (similar to how Altmetric for Scopus works). When it does show, there is a link out to view the record on Mendeley.
As a complement to traditional citation metrics, Mendeley readership can demonstrate alternative types of academic influence. The most read article on Mendeley, "How to choose a good scientific problem" (Alon, 2009), has received five citations in Scopus but has 54,629 readers on Mendeley! Furthermore 23 percent of users with this article in their library are PhD Students. This appears to demonstrate that this article has a much larger impact than that captured by citations alone (retrieved March 6, 2014, view in Scopus / view in Mendeley).
Additionally, some early research into the relationship of Mendeley readership with traditional citations has found evidence supporting that Mendeley readership counts correlate moderately with future citations.
Scopus has shown the total Mendeley readership as well as other alternative metrics in the Altmetric for Scopus widget since June 2012. By adding the demographic breakdown of Mendeley readers, Scopus expands its role as the abstracting and citation database that demonstrates the most comprehensive view of an article's impact.
