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My team is currently working on an integration of the Mendeley reference platform into our Web-App. We want to display the references of a logged in user in a sidebar.

To provide a familiar look and feel, we structure the data received from API calls like the original Mendeley library page ("All Documents", "Favorites", "My Publication", folders, groups, and subfolders), but we found no way to categorize a document/reference as "Recently Read" and/or "Recently Added".

  • How are those two defined?
  • Is there a way to request only recently read or recently added documents through the API or to calculate which of all documents fall into that category?
Daniel Bücherl
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1 Answers1

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I'm afraid there is no public API endpoint to provide the list of "Recently Read" documents.

As for "Recently Added" - you can obtain these with the publicly available API. Take a look at https://api.mendeley.com/apidocs/docs#!/documents/getDocuments. You can retrieve a list of documents ordered by their creation time.

Example GET URL for "Recently Added"

https://api.mendeley.com/documents?view=client&sort=created&order=desc&limit=50
Martin Marinov
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  • Thanks for answering. Is there any limitation to how many references are kept in recently added? – Daniel Bücherl May 06 '17 at 15:56
  • Hey @daniel-bücherl. You should be able to access all documents owned by the current user using the api.mendeley.com/documents endpoint. However, if the number of documents exceeds the limit pagination will occur. You can read more about it here: http://dev.mendeley.com/reference/topics/pagination.html – Martin Marinov May 08 '17 at 11:36
  • Maybe the question was a little bit imprecise formulated. I know how the pagination works. The question is: do you internally keep only a certain amount of documents in the category "recently added" (e.g. 200) or is it just a sort? If after uploading the 201st documents the first uploaded falls out of there, I would like to mirror that behavior. – Daniel Bücherl May 08 '17 at 12:44
  • Hello. The API itself, as we discussed, does not have limitations since it is a simple sort. Mendeley only provides documentation and support about the publicly available APIs. "Recently Added" is not an API concept which means that clients are free to implement it however they like. This means, if possible, you shouldn't assume a particular implementation since it is not guaranteed to always stay the same. – Martin Marinov May 09 '17 at 13:48
  • Bottom line is I can't really provide you with a concrete answer since we can't commit to always support the same definition of "Recently Added". – Martin Marinov May 09 '17 at 13:54
  • Thanks for your help. That was what I needed. If you could also have a look at my new question, it would be awesome: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43895586/requesting-csl-or-bibtex-from-api – Daniel Bücherl May 10 '17 at 14:37