C&RL News January 2010  56

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@
email.unc.edu

G a r y  P a t t i l l o

Mendeley
Described variously as the Last.fm of research or the iTunes of research papers, 
Mendeley could be world’s largest online research paper database by early 
2010. Mendeley is a free research management tool for computer desktops and 
the Web. It facilitates researchers connecting with others in their field, allows 
collaboration on documents, and indexes your personal collection of PDF docu-
ments and research papers. Digital bibliographies can be created on the Web 
or on your own desktop.
Mendeley Research Networks, cited December 1, 2009, www.mendeley.com.

Google advances
Google has announced several new search and other applications allowing users 
to use voice, location, and sight to find information, mostly on mobile devices. 
Google Goggles visual search enables users to take a snapshot of a landmark or 
business and receive results based upon the image. Google Translate has added 
a mobile application that translates audio from one language to another on the 
go. Google Favorite Places returns information on businesses that choose to 
display a special barcode. A local results application for mobile devices returns 
results based upon one’s GPS coordinates. Real Time search will automatically 
update search results as content is updated, for example, with Twitter, MySpace, 
or Facebook.
Greg Sterling, Google Mobile Gets ‘What’s Nearby,’ Voice Search Expands & ‘Goggles’ Search By Snapping Pictures, Search 
Engine Land, December 7, 2009, cited December 8, 2009, searchengineland.com/google-mobile-announcements-voice 
-languages-whats-nearby-goggles-31374.

Missing Web references
According to a new case study, “the number of [W]eb citations (in research pa-
pers) has increased from 41.60 percent of all citations in 1998 to 53.32 percent 
in 2002. But a substantial quantity of [W]eb citations (32.09 percent) was found 
to be missing.” The study measures the proportion of missing Web references 
of five-to-ten-year-old research papers of the five leading open access journals 
in library and information science. The percentage of missing Web citations 
increases with the age of the publication. Ten-year-old publication citations are 
missing about 40 percent of their Web citations; five-year-old publications are 
missing about 26 percent.
Mohammad Hanief Bhat, Missing Web References—A Case Study of Five Scholarly Journals,  Liber Quarterly 19 (2), 
December 2009, p.131–39, cited December 8, 2009, liber.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000468/article.pdf.

ARL library statistics
Serial expenditures in ARL libraries rose 374 percent from 1986 to 2008. During 
the same time period, monograph expenditures rose only 86 percent, while the 
number of monographs purchased remained flat at just under 33,000 monographs 
per year. Interlibrary borrowing activity rose 295 percent. From 1991 to 2008, 
total staff went down by 4 percent.
Martha Kyrillidou and Les Bland, comps. and eds, ARL Statistics 2007–2008, Association of Research Libraries (ARL), 
Washington, D.C. 2009, cited December 8, 2009, www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf.

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