I've just recently started to read academic papers and have fussed a bit with the best workflow. My hardware that I owned when I started the process were a Macbook Pro and Android Samsung Tab e 8.0. I've avoided purchasing any new hardware so far but may end up going with an iPad Pro or iPad Air if I cannot get satisfactory results with my Samsung Tab.
My software setup currently includes:
- Zotero -- reference management
- Zotfile -- pulls annotations out of the PDF for saving in Evernote, among other things
- Evernote -- The workhorse of my setup. I use this for both organizing my research projects, task lists, etc and also for notetaking while reading a PDF. This includes pulling annotations out of the PDF with Zotfile and storing them in an Evernote note.
- Google Drive -- for storing my PDFs. Each PDF has an Evernote note linked to it. This allows Evernote to full text search all my PDFs that are stored in Google Drive with OCR, so it will even detect any handwritten notes in a PDF.
- XODO -- I've tried many Android PDF annotation tools and currently XODO has been the best as far as UX while reading/annotating and also stability and integration with Evernote via Google Drive. Ideally I would use the built in annotation tool in Evernote but it is frustratingly slow on my Android device and the UX is suboptimal.
I've had a few issues with the Samsung Tab
- It is only 8" so it involves a lot of zooming and panning while reading.
- It has a split screen mode so I can have my notetaking app in one pane and my pdf annotator in the second screen. This works well except that, again, there is limited screen space
- I've struggled with finding an acceptable PDF annotation tool on Android.