Playing with @couchdb, starting to think of the Mendeley API as a read/write JSON store, and having a reader app built on that...less than a minute ago via Tweetie for Mac Roderic Page rdmpage It's slowly dawning on me that many of the ingredients for an alternative different way to browse scientific articles may already be in place.

In previous articles I've looked at how various apps display scientific articles. The apps I looked at were: PLoS Reader Nature Papers Mendeley So, where next? As Ian Mulvany noted in a comment on an earlier post, I haven't attempted to summarise the best user interface metaphors for navigation. Rather than try and do that in the abstract, I'd like to create some prototypes to play with various ideas.

Dario Taraborelli has released ReaderMeter, an elegant app built on top of the Mendeley API. You enter an author's name and it summarises that authorship's readership in Mendeley. The app provides some summary statistics (mine are shown below), and if you click on the horizontal bar corresponding to a paper, you can see a visualisation of who is reading your paper, including a nice map.

Apple's iBooks app is an ePub and PDF reader, and one could write a lengthy article about its interface. However, in the context of these posts on visualising the scientific article there's one feature that has particularly struck me. When reading a book that cited other literature the citations are hyper-links: click on one and iBooks forwards you (via the page turning effect) to the reference in the book's bibliography.

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Continuing the series of posts about reading scientific articles on the iPad, here are some quick notes on perhaps the most polished app I've seen, Papers for iPad. As with earlier posts on the Nature and PLoS apps, I'm not writing an in-depth review - rather I'm interested in the basic interface design. Papers is available for the Mac, as well as the iPhone and iPad.

Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote: Among the essays Paulo read is Jason Hoyt's post on the Mendeley blog: Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on?. In response to a question about open sourcing the Mendeley client, Jason replied: Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I

This week seems to be API week. The Encyclopedia of Life API Beta Test has been out since August 12th. By comparison with the Mendeley API that I've spent rather too much time trying to get to grips with, the EOL API release seems rather understated.

Following on from my earlier post about the Mendeley API, I've bundled up my code for OAuth access to the Mendeley API for anyone who's interested in playing with the API using PHP. You can browse the code on Google Code, or grab a tarball here.

Every so often I revisit the idea of browsing a collection of documents (or specimens, or phylogenies) geographically. It's one thing to display a map of localities for single document (as I did most recently for Zootaxa ), it's quite another to browse a large collection.