Mendeley, the free reference manager and academic social network, has released an Institutional Edition for research and impact analysis and signed up a number of leading academic establishments along the way.

Announced on Monday, Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) is a module developed to give librarians and heads of library insight into the way researchers work and use their library collection at document level. By offering the MIE to their end users, institutions can seemingly stimulate their productivity and gain real-time feedback on the usage of library content.

According to Victor Henning, Mendeley’s co-founder and CEO ,“the biggest problem in academia is the long waiting time: it can take three to five years from the time you have done research to get it published — all the decisions you make in an academic career are based around that time lag.”

The system is built on the back of usage data from Mendeley’s 1.85 million users. These members have collectively uploaded over 270 million documents, representing around 65 million unique research papers and studies (much larger than any existing commercial database). By tracking usage of these documents according to institution or research group, Mendeley aims to help institutions understand trends as they emerge,  not years later.

“I’m excited that after receiving scientific validation from the research community,” said Henning in the offical press release, “our data is now helping some of the world’s best universities work more efficiently and get to life-changing discoveries faster. My inner nerd is going: Wow, this is freaking amazing.”

The new data dashboard has already gained support from a number of research institutions, including the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council of Japan.

The Mendeley Institutional Edition provides the following features:

• Manage an institutional group. Invite users, see their public available profiles and research activities
• Provide access to licensed content for institutional users
• Compare journals read against holding list.
•  See number of articles in total and per journal have been added to members libraries over a selected period, and compare journals and/or drill down on disciplines
• See which articles have been added the most with link to more article statistics.
•  See number of total publications of your researchers and per journal over a selected period, and compare journals and/or drill down on disciplines.
•  See number of “readers” of your researchers’ publications across all users on Mendeley over a selected period, and drill down on disciplines or journals. Also see the ranking how often a published article from your researcher has been “read” by the Mendeley users

More screenshots available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mendeley/sets/72157630651813190/