Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

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

#51

Post by nl »

nuitblanche wrote: post #24

Ali, I have some experience in the process of doing the filtering you are mentioning as I write a blog on compressed sensing ( http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/ ), a field that spans a wide range of communities that are, often, not talking to each other nor have the same culture. I don't think Mendeley or any RSS feed services help much as they both target the same dead tree people who are generally about two years b…

I thought you meant you were using compressed sensing powered filters, maybe working on the summaries of papers from an RSS file.

That would be VERY interesting (and - dare I say it - probably impossible)

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

#52

Post by nl »

alimoeeny wrote: post #45
Jerpi wrote: post #10

This problem isn't unique to academia. If I were you I'd create a few Pipes (Yahoo Pipes) and then use Google Reader as a front-end that supports sharing and commenting.

I agree I am surprised why Google scholar has not made such thing (maybe as a Google Reader feature).

What exactly is RSS feeds from Google Scholar missing? (eg http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/create-your-own-go...)

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

#53

Post by stoney »

Mendeley has been mentioned a few times already. I'll just point out that it has some kind of API. I have no idea what it enables, I've been meaning to look into it, but it might be useful in terms of getting citation information for new papers, etc. In other words you might be able to build the system you want on top of Mendeley.

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

#54

Post by stoney »

alimoeeny wrote: post #41
barmstrong wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - do some crowd sourcing like HN for academics.

You all know, things like HN does not happen that often, specially in a world ruled by old professors. To build an HN for academics, first you need to be field specific (really narrowly specific!) and you need to be well known or supported in that community (this would make you an old professor!)

Don't start with the professors - start at the bottom and work up. Find a large-ish existing community of PhD students (e.g. all students at a certain lab) and build up from there.

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

#56

Post by MrGunn »

stoney wrote: post #53

Mendeley has been mentioned a few times already. I'll just point out that it has some kind of API. I have no idea what it enables, I've been meaning to look into it, but it might be useful in terms of getting citation information for new papers, etc. In other words you might be able to build the system you want on top of Mendeley.

Hi alimoeeny, et al., I'm the community liaison for Mendeley and would like to make myself available for any questions you may have if you decide to start building with the Mendeley API. You can indeed get citation information from it, as well as tags for finding related research, readership, and article metadata. The developers portal is http://dev.mendeley.com.

Additionally, on article pages on the main site, for example, http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/#0/abstract:r... you can see a "more like this" link which finds related research.

The combination of article recommendations and collaborative filtering improves discovery, so if you want to build something, I would of course suggest that Mendeley is a good place to start.

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

#57

Post by MrGunn »

_corbett wrote: post #21
bioinformatics wrote: post #3

Isn't that something that Mendeley is trying to do? I would be interested in seeing something like this and helping when and where needed.

I've used Mendeley (and use papers.app when I'm on a mac) and it has helped me more with organizing papers than in filtering them. What you see as an academic in the morning is a 100 papers staring you in the face and you fall back on pattern recognition at points if you don't have more than a few minutes. Whose names and institutions do you recognize? Which titles seem most similar to your line of research? But you…

Just as a technical update, expect to see more recommendations for things to read start to show up in Mendeley over the next couple months. Right now you can go to the article page for a paper, such as this one, http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/#0/abstract:r... and get recommendations, but that's not as useful as having recommendations pushed to you so when you get 100 new papers staring you in the face, you get the ranked according to priority and relevance.

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

#59

Post by jsarch »

sunir wrote: post #30

Hey Ali and others who are interested, I've been working towards launching a startup called Bibdex ( http://www.bibdex.com ) for a little while now. I want to help all research-oriented fields to sift through the large number of publications. It's amazing how many articles and manuscripts are published every day, not to mention blog posts and social commentary. Unlike the average person's surfing habits online, profe…

Sunir,

If you are not heavily invested in the name "Bibdex" for your company, you might want to look at changing the name because "BibDesk" (http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/) already exists as an usable product organizing publications. Specifically, the problem is that I would type/write/search for "bibdesk" when I hear "bibdex" and be rewarded by a product in the same market.

-J

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

#60

Post by jsarch »

adbge wrote: post #17

It sounds to me like maybe you should go one further than just creating a superb academic RSS reader, and instead try to create an online community for academics -- a la reddit for PhDs. Instead of simply indexing links to other sites, I think it would make sense to provide the necessary tools for academics to _easily_ host papers via this service. This way you wouldn't need to rely on typically paywalled online acad…

Two comments:

I like the idea of a "reddit for PhDs" because the community would "upvote" on the papers that are deemed important. You may need to have to have a different way of choosing which papers make the front page because papers don't necessarily follow the same trends as youtube videos.

I don't think academics want to "_easily_ host papers", they want to do research. They rely on Nature and Science to be the clearing house for quality research not the download source. Once published, the papers are downloaded, emailed, read, etc. as needed.

Post reply on HN