Tutorials

How to Build a Shareable Reading List or Researcher Profile in a Few Clicks

Every researcher ends up maintaining lists of documents: what you are reading, what your group has published, what newcomers to your topic should read first. The lists are valuable — maintaining them is what fails. Hand-edited pages go stale, exported citation lists are a chore to update, and the result rarely earns readers' trust. The Research Library, included in every Paper Digest membership, is built so that a credible, current list is a side effect of clicks you are already making.

The first half of that promise: management by clicking, not typing. Paper Digest assembles the documents for you — your own publications are already collected on your iSearch page, and the high-impact new papers of your field arrive in your daily digest every morning. Wherever you work on the platform — digest, search, literature review, deep research — Save to Library is one click; if a document is not on Paper Digest, upload it. You decide what the library includes by clicking, across the full range of genres: papers, patents, grants, clinical trials. Everything you save can be tagged, commented, and tracked by reading status; the library is built into the AI Academic Reader, so your notes and dialogs stay with each document; and every saved record is one click from its related papers, patents, grants, and experts.

The second half: readers trust it, and following it is easy. A public library is served by Paper Digest — a source millions of researchers know and trust, accessible worldwide with no account required — so your list carries a credibility a hand-built page struggles to earn. Readers can browse it by tag (research areas, author names), subscribe to it by RSS, and find it through search engines. And your homepage link sits at the top of the page, so the attention your library earns flows back to your own site.

One workflow, three results:

• A reading list — for your own tracking, and for colleagues, students, or followers to keep up with what you find worth reading.
• A personal researcher profile — your publications, patents, and trials, organized by research area, with your name and homepage on top.
• A group research profile — a lab, team or group publications page visitors can browse by member or by area.

The steps are the same for all three; only what you save and how you tag it differ. (For the reasoning behind the library-as-profile idea — and how it compares to Google Scholar, ORCID, and a personal website — see How to Create a Researcher Profile People Can Trust.) Sharing triggers no additional cost, and viewing a public library requires no account at all.

Step 1: Sign in

Sign in at paperdigest.org/user_login. Everything below happens under your existing account — there is nothing separate to register for.

Step 2: Add documents to your library

Where to start depends on what you're building.

For a researcher profile or group profile: start from iSearch

The iSearch page lists the works indexed under a name — for example, paperdigest.org/isearch/?name=andrew_ng. Open it for your own name (or each group member's name) and click Save under a document's title: the document is added to your library immediately. A publication record of decades usually takes minutes to collect this way. Patents, grants, and clinical trials under your name can be saved the same way, so the profile covers your whole record, not just papers.

For a reading list: save as you discover

Click Save to Library on the most recent works in your daily digest console or daily emails. To find the high-impact papers of a field, the same Save button is on the best paper digest and conference digest pages, the search console, literature review, and deep research. The list builds itself as a side effect of reading you were doing anyway.

Step 3: Organize your private library

Open paperdigest.org/library to see everything you've saved. By default every newly added document is private — nobody else can see it. Click Edit on any row to set its reading status (To Read / Reading / Read), add tags, and make comments.

The library is also built into the AI reader: while reading a document there, you can save it to the library directly, and store your comments, tags, and even the AI dialog alongside it — so when you return to a paper months later, your conversation with it is waiting.

Step 4: Make documents public

In your library table, click Edit on a document, check the Public box, and Confirm. The document immediately appears in your public library. Three privacy rules to know:

• Your comments and reading status are always private — they never show on the public page.
• If you uploaded a PDF yourself (rather than saving it from a Paper Digest page), the PDF stays private too. To show readers where they can access that document, add a public URL for it; that link appears on the public page.
• Unchecking Public removes a document from the public page at any time.

Tags are what make a public library browsable, so this is the step worth a few minutes of thought. Use English tags, separated by ; — readers can then view your public library filtered to a single tag.

• Reading list or personal profile: tag by research area — AI; Computer Vision or Infectious Disease — so readers can follow just the areas they care about.
• Group profile: tag by research area and member name — then visitors can browse the group's work by a specific person or a specific area, exactly like a well-maintained lab publications page.

Step 5: Set up your public profile

On the library page, click Edit Public Profile and fill in four fields:

• Display name — titles your public page. Put "John Smith" there and the page is titled JOHN SMITH's Public Library; a group name works the same way.
• Affiliation — shown under the title. Use your institution, or a short description of the list, like "Daily Reading for ML & NLP".
• Homepage — your personal site, GitHub, or group page, linked from the top so readers can find your main page.
• Default order — whether the page initially sorts by impact or by added date. For a researcher or group profile, choose impact, so your most influential work appears first; for a reading list, choose added date, so the newest additions lead. This only sets the initial view — readers can always re-sort by clicking any column.

Step 6: Check it and share it

Under your library's title you'll see a public library link — that is your permanent public URL. Open it to see exactly what visitors see, then share it: send it to colleagues, put it on your personal page, your group's website, your email signature. Anyone in the world can open it, no Paper Digest account needed. The page is also friendly to search engine bots, so over time readers can find your library through web search, and RSS is enabled — others can easily follow your future additions from their own RSS apps. Here's a live example of what a finished public library looks like, and the same library filtered to one tag.

From here, maintenance is one click: see a paper worth sharing, hit Save, tag it public. The page stays current because keeping it current is no longer a separate task.