Tips&Tricks

How-to series: How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog) [part 7 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal1 Comment

As you probably know that, whenever you add a document to your Mendeley library, the document details for that entry are aggregated into our Mendeley databases so as to allow you to easily synchronize your library across multiple platforms. These aggregated data are also used to generate our extensive and multidisciplinary research catalog that is continually growing, fueled by the ongoing uploading of references to your (and everyone else’) library.

This is all good and well but how about documents you don’t want to include in the catalog, or you don’t think are actually useful for others to have access via the research catalog? For those cases, we have a checkbox in the Document Details panel that allows you to keep that entry from being aggregated. It will still be synchronized across your multiple devices, but it will not have the Document Details aggregated to our research catalog.
There are plenty of situations where this can be useful. Notes from a class that you are storing and don’t believe are useful for others, manuscripts you are currently working on and therefore are still incomplete, etc.

In summary, if you’re adding a document and you don’t want the document details to be anonymously aggregated and made available for search in our research catalog, then go ahead and click on the “Unpublished work” checkbox in the Document Details panel on the right.

Unpublished Work Checkbox (in Mendeley Desktop)

There you go, simple stuff once again. In our next entry we’ll be touching on the topic of annotations.

Here are the previous six entries in our How-to series:

One thought on “How-to series: How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog) [part 7 of 12]”

  1. This is good, but it has a flaw: it requires a willing act from the user. So unless the users cares about the privacy of its own paper (i.e. private document) he/she will just forget about it, letting go into the library every kind of uncontrolled reference, and contributing to some noise in the database. So if it is good to protect your own papers, it is not enough for preserving a certain level of quality in the general catalog.

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