In our lab, as in many others we share a lot of papers. Some are just filled in to read later, some get only a quick scan of abstract and figures, some deeply inspected. In many cases these are shared among the lab with a note on the relevance.
The backbone of this system came from my PhD time: back in Christoph Bock's lab, there was a simple mailing list where anyone could post interesting papers. It wasn't fancy, but it worked nicely as an archive. You could search it but mostly it was used as a barometer for what people were excited about at any given time. That system stuck with me. From day one of starting my own group, I set up the same thing: an email address where we send papers with [paper] in the subject, a comment, and a link.
For the longest time, the list was just that - a mailbox. Useful to us, invisible to everyone else.
Last week I finally got around to changing that. I wrote a script that pulled all 554 papers from the inbox, extracts titles and DOIs from the URLs, looks up the journal names via Crossref, and renders them into a proper page on our lab site. It also generates an RSS feed, because I'm still nostalgic for the late 2000s internet and think feeds deserve a comeback. Finally, a UMAP and a few other plots describe the data - what is trending with time, how many and when papers are shared. Yes, the data scientist in me will never die.
It pairs nicely with the little browser extension we built a while back - one click to compose a [paper] email with the title and URL pre-filled.
You can see the result at rendeiro.group/cool-papers/ and subscribe to the RSS feed. If you build something similar in your lab, I'd love to hear about it.