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

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, professionals in these fields are required to be on top of the available research, but most of the available research is not very good. That seems like a problem worth solving, and a potentially profitable one if industrial and institutional researchers are willing to pay to save their time and publish higher quality research.

I'm curious. Have you seen http://www.mendeley.com yet? If you have, why doesn't that solve the problem for you?

-- Sunir, Founder & Developer, Bibdex

P.S. I'm interested in having other people join as co-founders.

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

Yes, thanks for the feedback. As with all things, good names are in short supply. I've learnt that it's a very common thing for grad students to build citation management software, and I fell into that trap as well.

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.

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 academic journals, and you wouldn't have to wait for papers to trickle down from Nature, etc.

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.

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.

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.

> In many disciplines everything is shared a year in advance via working papers.

Yes, absolutely.

not all fields are like that and not in all areas you want to be on the bleeding edge. For many purposes keeping up to date at journal paper level is more than enough.

True, but that isn't really that hard to do now. I can basically keep up to date by subscribing to top journals in my field.

Well here is the rub of it. Are you willing to pay a monthly subscription fee? How much?

if you could convince labs themselves to pay for it, it'd be a money maker, although this may require more direct marketing at first. many academic institutions hold subscriptions/licenses in the $10k range.

this would actually boost education and research performance and I am sure with the correct product and correct marketing could make good (!?) money.

I wouldn't bet on it. Making money in the academic institutional licensing world is tough, especially if you are marketing something that doesn't impact bottom-line figures for people who are concerned. Arguably this use case is as far removed from bottom line value adds as possible. In an optimal world you have a killer app that reduces University lead COA by 30% or something, but this would have to grow organically (so a lot of direct sales approaches are no good).

A friend of mine has been doing a lot of direct sales (quite successfully I might add) to institutions, but the reason he's making money is that his target audience is already doing a lot of number crunching, they have big budgets, and he's directly saving them cash. Something like this is probably a "nice to have" feature that would be near impossible to convince the school to pay for, to speak nothing of a worthy price tag (greater than $2k/yr for instance).

I sounds like a fun project, but I would not expect it to pay much, if anything. And an ad model's monthly revenue would be a joke.

In this space ads may actually be able to make money since the audience is very targeted. You even know what field everyone is in by looking at what papers they click on and such. It seems easy to have a free+ads plan and an $10/mo no ads plan.

I've looked into this problem briefly myself, and as a PhD student who runs an academically oriented start-up/web app, it's something I'd be very interested in seeing happen. In principle it should be quite easy to get working, at least for a few select journals (in my case it's the arXiv I'm interest in).

However, the one stumbling block that I see is an easy and effective way to extract citations. An important filter for whether a paper is relevant to me would be whether it cites some seminal papers in my field. There are services out there which index citations (SPIRES in my field[1]) but there is always a bit of a delay before they are updated. Using them would ruin the real-time nature of the service.

The only way I see around that is to extract the citations from the papers in the journal feed as they come in. But now the service has gone from a weekend project to a large undertaking that would require a substantial infrastructure to work.

I'll see how this thread continues to evolve, but I'd like to have further discussions about making this a reality.

[1] http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/

Whatever you do, don't reinvent the wheel. Build on top of a service like http://superfeedr.com/ or http://www.postrank.com/

Wow! I am speechless at the moment!

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

Go on guys!

I am checking the websites and products mentioned.

At least now we know for sure that everybody is having this problem AND there is no popular solution to this.

By the way, I am in Brain research.

http://www.yourxiv.com at least explains the problem and promises a solution but it only covers Physicists.

http://www.academia.edu/ seems to cover everyone (I am giving it a try right now) but they are overdoing the social part. (too much facebook!)

http://pubget.com/ is not addressing this problem (as far as I understand)

http://techlens.cs.umn.edu/ TechLens also addresses this problem but it seems not to cover every body (all research areas).

Many other things mentioned are not related or are addressing different problems.

Still reading your comments, Ali

Techlens does not cover preprints!

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.

Yes, it sounds like he wants Mendeley

No I don't!

As a user I need an intelligent filter with some sort of machine learning that can learn my interests by observing my ratings of some articles and rank the new articles automatically so that I won't need to scan hundreds of titles and tens of abstracts to find one important one.

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 can miss a lot of interesting things and not view things tangentially related, but possibly useful as often. Journal clubs attempt to mediate this by having a group of people each pick an article and bring it to the table but crowdsourcing this and having cross lab "bringing to the table" would be very useful.

I agree with you, I'm on a Mac too but I don't use Papers; I use Zotero/Citeulike, that somewhat solve this. But I would like to see something better than these solutions and/or Mendeley, which is ultimately very bad.

I started JournalFire so journal clubs could post what they were reading online. You can follow clubs or individuals, and the articles they're reading or discussing will show up in your feed. Let me know what you think http://journalfire.com

I'm using it and trying to setup our journal club through it. Nice tool.

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.

Yes, this sounds a lot like Mendely http://www.mendeley.com/

I've faced the same problem with info overload, even with the new astrophysics subfields introduced by arXiv. I am an active user of papers.app and have used Mendeley in the past; it helps with organizing but filtering is still a challenge.

I've thought about doing something like this for the arXiv, even something as simple as setting up a http://www.pligg.com/ may be a start; I'm planning to do at least that much for my own lab in the next few months.

I've already got two other startups of my own so I couldn't commit to a larger version of this side project at this point, but ping me if you want to chat about ideas and I could possibly point you to others with more bandwidth. I have experience in iPhone app development, web dev, and machine learning--and of course in startup founding and academia (I've worked in 7 labs doing research, now am a PhD student in astrophysics).

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 behind on the good stuff. Arxiv is good but not all the communities use arxiv either and so it really is a mix of different tools that yield the most results.

I have a high interest in expanding and automating my current processes and would be very much willing to talk to somebody who would want to spend some time on this.

I also agree with one of the posters, how much do you think people would be willing to pay for this service ?

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)

http://academia.edu/

Was going to post this too. Seems designed precisely for what the OP wants.

Yes, it claims so, but so far I can't see how it does it. It is full of social feature but seems to lack the intelligent filtering thing we need.

Looks like what you want is a version of this: http://techlens.cs.umn.edu/tl3/

Read an article about Techlens on ACM here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297268&dl=GUIDE&#...

The ACM abstract gave a good overview of what the site was supposed to do, but when I went to the actual site, it was horriblyi designed with no clear description of what the service was supposed to do.

Maybe if the OP Gave a very well designed application using existing implementations it would take off.

I don't think Techlens would do well with preprints.

There is definitely a need for this.

@kaelswanson had this idea 4 years ago (and I'm sure many others)

BUILD IT

Have you heard of PubGet?

http://www.PubGet.com

I haven't heard of it yet. Have you been using it? What do you like / dislike about it?

I think you could construct this in a day using Yahoo Pipes. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ It doesn't require programming skills.

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.

Check out http://www.yourxiv.com

Have you had a look at PhilPapers: http://philpapers.org/ ? It does exactly what you propose, but only for philosophy.

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...)

There is one website working on these lines http://www.NanoInfoline.com/

Don't most professors pay students to do this?

Have you tried Google Scholar Alerts? Works well for me. If that doesn't suit, consider it as a baseline for functionality.

In my case, Google alert is part of my mix.

I actually use Pubmed to get notifications on people or keywords that I am interested in. And I should confess that it is not that bad (but it could be much much better)

http://journalfire.com/

i want something like this. :-)

I'll volunteer 10-15 hours a week to build a recommendation engine like this!

I too have wanted a search-engine/feed-reader, no-holds-barred web-experiment that does exactly what you describe. I'm not an academic, but I have fairly deep & broad reading interests across mathematics, physics, economics, history, etc. Ok, make that broad interests in basically every subject that is truly interesting. I'm the guy who pretty much reads journal articles for fun because newspapers, magazines, blogs, and most books suck and just aren't smart enough.

But it's more work for me to find reading material I like and want to learn from than it is for me to read it.

I could certainly hack around on something like this, as I too have been wanting to scratch this itch for a many years. I've got the time, since I'm currently un(der)-employed(ahh, gotta love contracting) and bored, but my first two roadblocks would be:

1) instant non-starter: I no longer have any university library proxy account to use to login and scrape the journals, abstracts, authors, citations, etc. I personally could care less about copyrights on academic papers. I justify my position via jury nullification using a jury of one—me. And I don't give a second thought to doing whatever dirty work it takes for building a system of scraping scripts to pull all info about every paper from every journal out there.

2) If the beta site gets even the smallest amount of traffic, I will be crushed by EC2 server and bandwidth bills.

I realize a bajillion other folks probably want to build the exact same thing, and I realize it's stupid to build your own when someone else might already be well along the way and just needs some help.

Anyone need a Linux/Ruby/SQL/Sysadmin/Wear-All-Hats-Get-Shit-Done developer? I'm in LA and on #freenode. Just say the word!