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Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

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Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

#1
Problem: As an academic I am overwhelmed by the number of articles that are published in the relevant journals every week and there is no "efficient" way to filter out the irrelevant ones and keep up with the on going progress in my field of research.

Solution: All good journals have RSS feeds and in the context of academic interests you can "easily" detect relevant papers based on author, keywords and affiliation (one might eventually add some social feature as well, but it definitely would work based on individual ratings without any social features). So a user would select some journals and starts by staring the relevant papers or authors or ... After a while there would be enough evidence accumulated to support the classification of new papers into relevant or irrelevant groups.

Also there would be room for all sorts of alerts and sharing and commenting and ...

I (and I am sure many others) have had this idea for a long time but I am a currently not a position to do this myself and other people who attempted to do it had done it wrong, I was wondering if there is anyone who want to do this (I would be happy to help in design or even implementation or I'd be also happy if anyone gets the idea and build their own tool without getting me involved).

Ali

Re: Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

#2
This needs to be done well, I agree. Everybody I know in academia has had this idea, so there is demand. However, journals are far too late. In many disciplines everything is shared a year in advance via working papers. These are often posted on authors webpages or on conference pages before anywhere with a formal rss feed. I want to subscribe to specific authors and be confident I get things first.

This will be hard to do well and while the CPM might be great for some categories, it's a niche product. It would be a great service though.

Re: Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

#9
I am develoing an opensource webapp with similar requirements (noticing relevant parliament/government news in Lithuania).

It can index more than RSS feeds (you know, government websites ;-)) and uses Lucene/Solr for searching documents.

Our website: http://kaveikiavaldzia.lt/ Source code: http://github.com/emilis/PolicyFeed

I would gladly answer any questions.

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