Setting up a private group on Mendeley to support your group project

Many of our students are busy working on their group projects.

Our top tip is to set up a private group on Mendeley. You can use it to store all your references, and to share the full text of PDF documents with other members. As well as downloading them, your group will be able to work directly on the same papers online at the same time, highlighting and annotating them to support your project. Individual comments will also show who made them and when they were made, to help you make sense of the notes.

Mendeley allow up to 25 people to work together which is helpful for your group work!

Getting started

Find out more about setting up a private group on Mendeley (Mendeley support site)
Watch the short video tutorial (YouTube)
Visit our own Mendeley help pages (University intranet)

Tips

Only one member of the project group needs to create the private Mendeley group. We have heard it is best that you wait until everyone has joined the group before you start adding documents to it. If your group size appears to be restricted, it may be because the current owner of the group does not have enough available storage space.

Mendeley has also confirmed that you need to add a PDF file to the group area before you start annotating it. If you annotate it in your own account before you share it, none of the other members of your group will be able to see your notes.

If Mendeley isn’t for you, did you also know you can share documents on Teams?  Just create a team and convert your PDFs to Word documents.  These can then be shared via the Teams files and annotated by your group.  But remember you will still need to create the references for all your sources when you are done.

And of course, don’t forget that your Librarian is more than happy to help you find relevant information for your project, as well as supporting your use of Mendeley, if you need them!

Good luck!!