TrendMD drives a 77% increase in Mendeley saves

TrendMD and JMIR: Driving a 77% Increase in Mendeley Saves

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TrendMD and JMIR conducted a 4-week randomized control trial showing increased Mendeley saves for articles promoted with TrendMD

Back in 2016, we published a study showing TrendMD’s efficacy at increasing pageviews for JMIR articles (49% increase in article views for 500 articles given a $250 budget). Of course, one of the main goals of increasing article visibility is to increase the citations for that article. Multiple studies have shown that the best predictor of citations is article saves of articles on reference managers, so our next step was to show that the increased pageviews TrendMD drives correlate to increased article usage on these reference managers.

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The Study: How TrendMD Impacts Article Saves on Mendeley

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In October, TrendMD and The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) conducted a follow-up study to determine how promoting an article using TrendMD affects article saves in Mendeley. We took 400 articles published between October 1, 2014, and April 30, 2016, and randomly assigned them to the TrendMD promotion group or a control group.

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Prior to the start of our study, the two groups of articles were comparable in terms of pageviews and Mendeley saves. However, after 4 weeks, articles in the TrendMD promotion group exhibited a 77% increase in mean Mendeley saves (6.2 saves compared to 3.5 in the control group).

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Key Findings: TrendMD’s Role in Boosting Scholarly Impact

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TrendMD has previously been proven to increase article pageviews. This study extends that evidence by demonstrating that TrendMD also boosts article usage, as indicated by the significant increase in Mendeley saves. Together, these findings suggest that TrendMD is a potent discovery tool that could contribute to higher citation rates for academic articles.

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Conclusion: TrendMD as a Powerful Tool for Increasing Citations

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Stay tuned for posts highlighting various aspects of our study over the next month. You can also check out the full study here.

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[2] Zahedi, Z., Costas, R., & Wouters, P. (2015). Do Mendeley readership counts help to filter highly cited WoS publications better than the average citation impact of journals (JCS)? arXiv:1507.02093.

[3] Maflahi, N., & Thelwall, M. (2016). When are readership counts as useful as citation counts? Scopus versus Mendeley for LIS journals. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67, 191–199. doi:10.1002/asi.23369.

[4] Thelwall, M., & Wilson, P. (2016). Mendeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67, 1962–1972. doi:10.1002/asi.23501.