Building the Ultimate Cross Publisher Search Tool on Mendeley

Abstract

Researchers now spend more time searching for relevant papers than reading them. With the volume of academic content expected to grow exponentially, we were motivated to build search tools which help researchers reclaim valuable time and become more productive.

Mendeley is primarily a reference manager product, but also has a large researcher community providing insights into how academics consume content across all publishers.

Over the last year, we set out to build a cross-publisher search experience on Mendeley that solved the most prominent problems our users faced while leveraging community insights to boost relevancy, predict intent and enable more profound discovery journeys. The results so far are promising and have doubled the number of PDF’s consumed per search visit.

This is the story of the outcomes and lessons learned as we researched, planned, designed and built a new search experience while collaborating across multiple teams. The result, we believe, will benefit all Elsevier search solutions while speeding up product innovation.

Keywords: search, academic, Mendeley, Elsevier, community, relevancy, cross-publisher