Can a Social Music Site Help You With Your Next Research Paper?

The popular online music community Last.fm has recently become an unsuspecting benefactor to the world of scholarly research. The founders of Last.fm have helped fund a new online research service called Mendeley, which they tout as being “like iTunes for research papers.” Built on the same technology as Last.fm, they hope to provide a one-stop tool for organizing, managing, discovering, and sharing research papers. Mendeley is designed to work in a similar fashion to Last.fm’s online music community—a community where users listen to Internet radio stations that are designed to reflect their listening habits and tastes, learn about new artists similar to their favorite artists, and socialize with listeners who have similar music interests. Mendeley provides the same types of services, but for research papers. Instead of music genres there are academic disciplines and instead of albums there are papers. The best part is Mendeley will recommend new sources and colleagues based on your selections.

Using Mendeley, researchers can create groups through which they can collaborate on research by sharing documents and resources as well as keep up with related relevant research on topics that are of mutual interest to the group. When a user first signs on with Mendeley, they are given the option to index all of their documents. Mendely subsequently organizes all of the indexed documents into what is essentially your own personal digital bibliography.

Here’s a quick introduction to Last.Fm and Mendeley:

So, what’s all of this cost? Well, Mendely is free (for now). It can be managed via the Web or from a user’s desktop so users can always have access to their sources. Check out Mendley and join the new research revolution.