tags: Mendeley; references; academia

Mendeley profiles were deprecated (among other things) 2020-12-10

You might have noticed (who am I kidding, obviously you didn't) I removed the Mendeley link in my profile tab. Mendeley finally deprecated profiles and several other features of their platform.

Changes were announced in November 2nd. The list of removed features include:

  1. Mendeley Profiles

  2. Mendeley Feed

  3. Mendeley Public Groups

  4. Mendeley Funding

Can't say I'll miss the funding bit, but the three others were cool to have. The feed, in special, pointed me to several new references, we use a public group to disseminate our group's list of works, and I personally used the profile feature as one more academic profile (with the benefit that adding my works as references was one click away for people visiting it).

Mendeley says, in their statement, they, following user demand, want to focus on their primary goal: being a good reference manager. Still, as Mendeley is owned by Elsevier, makes me wonder if this isn't simply about market segregation, as other Elsevier products already had profiles, for example.