Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Use Mendeley to list your publications on your personal homepage

I was updating/creating my personal website a little while ago and was looking for a good method to keep my "Publications" page updated without having to edit it manually.
At first I played around with using Exhibit. This was kind of fun and allowed my publications to be sorted in all kinds of ways and exported in lots of formats.However, this method seemed like overkill (might be more useful if I had hundreds of publications....maybe one day but not today), and required that I update a .bib file every time I had to add a publication.

Then I noticed that my Mendeley profile has a nicely formatted page of my publications. Unfortunately, Mendeley doesn't yet provide html code to embed this on your own page, there is a slight workaround.
  1. In your Mendeley software client create a new collection and name it "Publications" (you can rename this later if need be).
  2. Add your publications to this new collection. Note!! The publications need to be added from oldest to newest one at a time. This is because Mendeley orders the publications by the date they were added to the collection (and not by pub. date).
  3. Right-click->Edit Settings, then under "Collection Access" choose "Public - visible to everyone". Then click "Apply and Sync".
  4. Go to the settings again for the collection and follow the web link to the collection online.
  5. In the upper right click on "Embed on other websites". You can customize the size and the color if you want. Then copy the html code to your website, blog, etc.
  6. That's it! When you have a publication to add just add it to your new "publications" collection, sync, and now your personal page is updated as well.
The default settings will result in your publications looking like this:

Publications is a group in Biological Sciences on Mendeley.



For my personal website I changed the color and made it a bit larger so it looks like this.