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A little while ago I was doing something that often gets pushed into that time in the festive season, between December 24 and January 2, when email is a bit quieter than usual. That is, I started writing a paper I’d been meaning to get to for a while. Coincidentally, my wife, a practicing clinician, was also writing a paper. What struck me was the difference to our approaches.

Ahead of the holidays, my wife had done some literature searches (admittedly on quite different topics), spoken to a few colleagues at her teaching hospital, and then found her references through PubMed, MEDLINE and in the hospital library. She then got copies of the papers, printed them off, highlighted the relevant parts – with a real marker – and began crafting her introduction.

Other than search PubMed, I did things quite differently. I searched a few more places online – such as Google Scholar, just plain Google, and, naturally, F1000Prime – but I also checked out a couple of public groups on Mendeley of which I’m a member. I also posted one or two specific questions on Twitter in case I’d missed any new papers or case studies. We both made our deadlines, but I’d like to think my approach was more efficient (although I couldn’t say which paper was any better).

Which brings me to the point of this microcosmic narrative on the evolving methods of digital scholarship. Mendeley is a tool I’ve mentioned on this blog before and often mention in F1000 presentations and workshops about measuring research impact on the web, as well as alternative metrics (of which F1000Prime is an established part). Groups are one of Mendeley’s most useful features, as they leverage the resources of “the crowd” to source papers on topics that interest an individual. At F1000 we’re interested to increase the reach and utility of F1000Prime data, in creative ways, and we imagine a number of F1000Prime users also use Mendeley – and vice versa. So we’re today announcing a pilot partnership with Mendeley to share information on articles that are recommended in F1000Prime.

We’ve created a group which mirrors one of the F1000Prime Faculties – Bioinformatics & Computational Biology – that we believe is likely to be popular with web-savvy life scientists who use Mendeley. The group is a listing of bibliographic information about each article recommended in the Faculty in 2013 plus a link to the recommendation in F1000Prime (F1000Prime recommendations are published units in their own right so are also save- and share-able through Mendeley’s web importer). The list of all recommended articles in an F1000Prime Faculty normally requires a personal or institutional subscription but is freely available in this group. To ensure the content mirrors what’s on F1000Prime, we’re systematically adding articles to the group each week. This means public contributions to the group are not permitted but anyone interested in finding the best research in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology can and should ‘follow’ the group to receive updates on newly added articles. We welcome comments on the value of sharing F1000Prime data across different scholarly platforms in this way.