National research impact indicators from Mendeley readers

•Mendeley readership data can be used to compare the research impact of countries.•Citation-corrected Mendeley readership counts give more stable national research impact indicators for recent years than do citation counts.•Comparisons of national impact based on citations or readers both contain sources of bias that are not possible to measure.

National research impact indicators derived from citation counts are used by governments to help assess their national research performance and to identify the effect of funding or policy changes. Citation counts lag research by several years, however, and so their information is somewhat out of date. Some of this lag can be avoided by using readership counts from the social reference sharing site Mendeley because these accumulate more quickly than citations. This article introduces a method to calculate national research impact indicators from Mendeley, using citation counts from older time periods to partially compensate for international biases in Mendeley readership. A refinement to accommodate recent national changes in Mendeley uptake makes little difference, despite being theoretically more accurate. The Mendeley patterns using the methods broadly reflect the results from similar calculations with citations and seem to reflect impact trends about a year earlier. Nevertheless, the reasons for the differences between the indicators from the two data sources are unclear.