Hacker News Reader

Comment by EngineerBetter | Hacker News Reader

Is this why they bought Mendeley, a document-management start-up who did a lot of data mining on academic papers, including terabytes of Elsevier's?

Hint: probably. I used to work there.

View on HN

Shit. I'm using Mendeley and did not know this. I'll stop using it at once. Any suggestions for alternatives?

Zotero is pretty decent and Open Source.

A killer feature of Mendeley for me was its ability to extract metadata from PDFs. I remember that I could not find a comparable functionality in Zotero last time I evaluated it. Is there any way to do it now?

EDIT: found it! Great!

I use Zotero (+ownCloud for storage) as well, a bit quirky at times but has all the functionality I need. Don't know how good the standalone program is, I only use the browser plugin+libreoffice plugin and occasionally the dreaded ms-office plugin as well (if not working with latex).

Standalone works very well too. Can recommend.

I am happy since moving from Mendeley to Zotero. I like that I can store my pdfs on dropbox, and use Zotero on many different PCs. Mendeley's insistence on absolute paths to the database prohibited this.

Zotero's use of Google Scholar to extract metadata from pdfs made it easy when starting with several thousand pdfs.

Elsiveer has its own in house big data team HPCC - A few years ago when I worked for another part of Elsevier I tried to get New Scientist interested in using ML to montize the 50 years or archives they had.

But the NS editor Was/Is a bit of a Luddite so nothing came of it.

Are you willing to put in a bit more detail about why you think that? I would be interested for one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com