ITunes for Research Papers | Hacker News Reader

ITunes for Research Papers

mendeley.com

51 pointssamratjp21 comments

If people really do want to manage papers like they do music, I hope the eventual upshot is something like an iTunes Store for journal articles. I often want to purchase an individual paper that I'm interested in, but the going rate for a PDF download from a commercial paper database (e.g., Elsevier) is currently around $25.

I doubt these prices face much market pressure since universities generally purchase institution-wide access; papers in those databases can be downloaded freely by anyone on the university network. I'll bet that people like me, not currently affiliated with any school, make up a tiny fraction of their market.

I am sure there are many in the industry who have similar needs such as yours and wouldn't mind this idea at all. What would be nice is that if the platform had tools for peer review, revision control, etc.

The process of buying research articles could greatly use some centralization, period. Right now it's a muck of confusing, widely different websites with completely different rules and interfaces for finding and downloading papers. If you have the "benefit" of institution-wide access to get free papers, you are then forced to access everything through your institution's proxy, which layers on more kludge and slowness.

Pubmed and later Google Scholar provided the first great leap in allowing article citations to be found quickly from a centralized database. But generally you had to grab this citation and then trudge through the journal's article search interface via your institution's proxy to then retrieve the actual paper. Being able to click Buy Now, or Access Now, and get the actual paper via a flexible authentication system that works across institutions, would be the next revolution. I don't see any indicator that journals are moving to build this, though, so we are indefinitely stuck with an endless patchwork of incompatible e-commerce sites and institutional proxies.

The result is that a bucketload of undergrads are still stuck collecting PDF's via the gateways as their daily drudgework, allowing primary investigators in universities around the country to put off finding actual labwork for the undergrads to do ;-)

There are a bunch of HN startups in the same building as these guys, including us at Timetric (http://timetric.com/), Smarkets (http://smarkets.com/) and Rjdj (http://rjdj.me/).

London is coming. :)

This looks exactly like Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) which is fantastic.

edit: Missed the "free" part. Papers $40.

If you're willing to shell out a few bucks, I highly recommend mekentosj's Papers over Mendeley. Among the free options, I prefer CiteULike (web-based; http://www.citeulike.org ) or Bibdesk (Mac OS X; http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net ).

I had used Papers for a couple years off and on. I really thought it was worth the money, but after I discovered Mendeley, I found it more useful. The built in synchronization of Mendeley works better than using Papers + Dropbox (which didn't work well). Importing papers seemed easier with Mendeley and a browser. Also, I have a couple of personal Macs and an Ubuntu box at work and it's nice to be able to run Mendeley on both.

I might not be up to date on all the features of Papers but I am pretty sure they never added a better way to sync between computers.

Agreed, I dropped papers for mendeley and I'm recommending it to everyone.

The biggest problem with Papers is citations. Or better, the lack of a decent citation manager. Papers works good for sorting articles. But for most researchers the endproduct is an article with citations. I found it really hard to use Papers in combination with other citation managers.

In the last release Papers did add the possibility for citation export to Word, however managing the styling for different journals was far from ideal. I hope Mendeley will solve this for me.

I've used Papers for a while and it's great.

It's free and cross-platform with collaboration and annotation features ... yep, Papers was a waste of money (Papers did finally fix the bug, so it starts without crashing now that I don't use it).

On the other hand signing up created a public social network profile, subscribed me to a newsletter and updates, and seems to offer no way to delete the account. Great, I just wanted to play with the software.

Came across it when I got lazy with managing citations and just organizing research data. Endnote does citations fine, but Mendeley is much nicer to organize snippets with. Get firefox add-on Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) to one-click page to be added to Mendeley, which then greps all sorts of useful stuff like abstracts, authors, vitals, etc.

upvotes for zotero - unfortunately, I have moved on to Chrome and zotero dont workee in Chrome.

Looks like the zotero team is no hurry to move to Chrome yet: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3955/chrome-compatibilit...

And the official browser support page: http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/browser_compatibility

Another Zotero user here with one foot in Firefox and another in Chrome.

Previously known as "the last.fm for research". Why the change?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948316

More people are aware of iTunes? Plus it seems to offer download and catalog files similar to what you can do to media files in iTunes.

Hm. The download link states "Available for Windows and Mac", yet the screenshot on the download page shows it being run in Ubuntu. Is there actually some hidden Linux version and I am just missing something?

EDIT: I just realized it says "also available for". Ignore my ignorance :)

Smart move to launch it on a friday. Friday is usually the semi-slacking day for researchers. Most of them (includig me) don't mind playing around with something like this on a friday.

Wow, that could be sensational... will play with it this weekend...

Why can't I have multiple research/academic fields?

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