One of the great uses of public groups on Mendeley is maintaining a curated set of references about a given topic. This can become really handy for many different reasons. One of which might be the maintenance of a reading list. For this post, we will use the example use-case of a teacher that wants to maintain a reading list for their class.
By creating an invite-only public group on Mendeley, you can put together a list of references along with anyone you invite to the group. So, in our hypothetical teacher story, some potential invitees would be students or teaching assistants.
Ok, so let’s look at how this would work:
- Our teacher needs a website where the reading list will be embedded.
- Next step would be to create a public invite-only group to store the references they’d like to have listed on the website. This can be done in Mendeley Desktop or Mendeley Web.
3. Once the group is created, the teacher (or an invited member of the group) can add references to the group folder. Simply drag and drop references or PDFs into the group.
4. With the references added to the group, it is now possible to go ahead and get the necessary code to embed the reading list on the class website. The appearance of the embedded code can be customized via a set of option.
5. Once the HTML code is added to the website, it now dynamically updates whenever the reference list is updates within Mendeley Desktop. No more editing HTML or making changes to the website code.
By using the embeded code, no further HTML code is required to maintain the website. This means that next year, if the reading list needs updating, it’s simply a matter of adding, removing or updating references in the Mendeley Group.
Here are the previous entries in this twelve part How-to series:
- How to merge author names
- How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
- Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
- How to check for duplicate entries and merging
- How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!)
- How to add supplementary data to references
- How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog)
- How to export your annotations (alone or with your PDF)
- How to merge contiguous citations with word plugin.
- How to search your notes (and other fields)
- How-to connect your Mendeley account to your Twitter account
Mendeley Blog 
Hi Ricardo,
very interesting new service. Just some questions. Describing step 3 you write “Simply drag and drop references or PDFs into the group.” Draging the PDFs is just the Mendeley way to import the reference data, not the PDF file? Is it possible to create such a reading list in connection with a TeamPlan, to share the PDFs? So all the Journal Clubs and the likes would really have to use Mendeley. And a good reason to promote this tool. The reading list allows more than 3 “invited collaborators” without a PremiumPackage?
Thanks a lot! Regards, Michael
Hi Michael,
I’m sorry for the late response but do let me answer your questions.
– You drag and drop a PDF into your library. Then, you drag that reference into your private group. Since it is a private group, the reference AND the PDF become available to other members you invite into that private group.
– Publicly accessible reading lists are only available for the public groups – invite-only and open.
– Invites members to the Invite-only groups are limited by the same constraints as your private groups. However, any number of people can follow the public group and see the references added.