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Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

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Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#91

Post by crieff »

Had a library of about 800 articles that I read on a laptop with a large format external monitor.

Related question: doing the above had some pain points so I wrote an app to give me the ability to give files and directories human readable names. Read, annotate, and bookmark the pdf within the app. Then be able to search across the whole library on annotations and keywords which would open the pdf to the page and paragraph the annotation referenced. The big thing it does is answer the question: I have read something that I need right now, but where in this huge pile of paper (or directory) is it?

I have gotten the app to the MVP stage, is there any other functionality that would be useful, and would anyone else find this useful?

Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#95

Post by ropeladder »

StreakyCobra wrote: post #31

The device? My laptop. The setup on my laptop: - Zotero ( https://www.zotero.org/ ) A software that allows you to easily keep references to academic papers right from your browser. Available as standalone app with multiple browser extension, or directly integrated into firefox. When you are on a paper's webpage, clicking on the button extracts its information, its PDF (if available) and do a capture of the webpage an…

If you want to sync larger Zotero libraries for free between computers you can use SyncThing to sync the libraries and then let Zotero sync up the database. SyncThing isn't cloud based, so your machines have to be on at the same time, but otherwise it works great.

I posted instructions on the Zotero forums a while back: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/50191/syncing-zotero-wi...

Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#96

Post by jingwen »

merraksh wrote: post #44

Sorry for nitpicking: shouldn't the question be What device do you use to read academic papers? or What device do you read academic papers with? Non-native speaker here, so my nitpicking might actually be useless.

Thanks for the nit! I thought it read weird.

Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#97

Post by ChuckMcM »

These days I read them in Drawboard PDF on a Surface Pro 4. Easy to write notes on. I keep them in Evernote in notebooks by topic. I'd really prefer a better indexing scheme but that is what I have. As a small product idea I expect that a way to both manage a library of papers and let me write notes on them and let me cite them easily when writing a paper, would be a handy thing to have.

Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#98

Post by goerz »

neutralid wrote: post #58

Macbook: - Bibdesk ( http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net ): archiving papers (automatic rename / custom citekey generation), Google Scholar bibtex extraction, and bibtex interface w/ TeXShop - Google Drive: storing archive ... it's not a great archive solution because of google's special system of renaming files, however stuck with it because of work iPad: - Goodreader: fast PDF renderer I wish there was a bibdesk app for…

There's an app "PocketBib" that synchronizes Bibdesk to the iPad (through Dropbox or Google Drive). It has a basic reader built in, but you can open individual papers in Goodreader (or any other reading app). Of course, if you have the papers in Dropbox/Google Drive anyway, you could also open them directly in Goodreader. In that case, PocketBib is just an interface for the database.

Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#99

Post by lorenzhs »

f_allwein wrote: post #35
teekert wrote: post #12

A printer. What I need is an e-ink device that lets me take notes on it and is large and fast and shows the images in color. Zooming would make it superior to paper. It's just not there yet. I tried to read articles in NCBI's ebook format on my kindle but you can't hop back and forward easily on a Kindle and note taking is of course not an option.

Have you tried a tablet? I'm really happy with my iPad for academic paper reading. Yes, eInk is very nice, but today's tablets are good enough for reading as well. Plus, it's a different kind of reading compared to, say, a novel. I tend to read academic papers quite quickly to glean the main bits of information. For leisurely reading, paper or Kindle would be better.

I use my desktop for skimming a paper to determine whether it is worth reading (on a 24" portrait screen). An iPad would also work nicely there. Both are also very convenient when searching for a specific term. But if I really want to read and understand a paper, I print it out because I'll be marking all kinds of of things, making notes on the margins, and constantly referring back and forth for definitions etc. I find all of this is much easier on paper.

I find tablets and e-readers very convenient for reading things from front to back and for full-text search, but find myself resorting to paper copies for anything else.

Re: Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

#100

Post by victorhooi »

I'm a big fan of e-ink devices for reading - I've gone through Nooks and Kindles.

This upcoming one looks interesting - 10.3" E-Ink tablet, with a stylus - and they claim they've got input latency down to 55 ms:

https://getremarkable.com/ https://blog.getremarkable.com/better-paper-better-thinking-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34I27KPZM6g

The YouTube video above shows them drawing with the device at 0:40 - I asked, and apparently that's the actual device in use.

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