Show HN: We built a modern research paper reader | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built a modern research paper reader

ontosyn.com

11 pointsweyxie5 comments

Over the past year, we’ve been frustrated with how clunky it is to manage research papers. So we built Ontosyn, a modern research paper reader, with clean ui, better in paper navigation (bookmarks, jumping back up after clicking on a reference), an integrated ai chat with useful tools such as recommending relevant papers that you can directly add to your library, and, of course, library functionality to keep everything organized.

We launched a closed alpha last week, and our first users are quite pleased with it. One user asked for author-based search for paper recommendations yesterday, and we shipped it within an hour.

Our goal is to make it easy to stay up to date with relevant research and enjoy engaging with it.

We have lots of cool features planned, we’re still very early, and we’d love to iterate with feedback from the HN community.

You can try it at ontosyn.com

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Do you have cite as you wrote functionality implemented ? Current research paper tools like Zotero do fine for the organisation and management part. The major limitations are poor integration with text editors and word processors.

We don‘t have writing implemented yet other than comments at the side of the paper. But we‘re working on implementing a good editor. Do you have any suggestions what you‘d like to see in the product (other than the already mentioned cite as you write)?

I would suggest that you pay close attention to what kind of 'academic' you are targeting.

In my opinion, the needs of STEM researchers are very different from those of the humanities. STEM researcher tend to use citations to substantiate pre-existing information, almost never have footnotes, and typically have schematics/flowcharts/graphs in their documents.

A good editor should be able to cross-reference citations, figures, handle SVG smoothly and definitely have Mermaid/MathJax support.

Thank you for the pointers! We will consider this. Are you a researcher yourself? Would love to hear about your experience using our app.

Sounds good!

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