Would you be interested in receiving an academic paper by email everyday? | Hacker News Reader

Would you be interested in receiving an academic paper by email everyday?

8 pointsmurtza19 comments

I like keeping up with emerging research in multiple fields, such as biology, physics, and computer science. Yet, most of the research I find out about is from news sources or aggregators, such as NYT or HN.

I am thinking about creating a free service where I send you one academic paper everyday by email. The user will select what fields he or she is interested in, and I will email a paper from one of those fields.

A potential problem is that a lot of academic papers are behind paywalls, but I still think there are enough freely available research papers to make this service viable.

Are there any services like this that you are aware of? Would you be interested, and if so what would you want in such a service?

Thanks!

View on HN

I would like such a service, but don't know enough about what I find interesting to make use of it.

Most comp sci stuff bores me, though some is fascinating. Due to the nature of the field, it may be hard to set keywords to find things of interest.

Other fields, such as history, are different. Right now I'm writing a book about a certain region's history. I'd like to be able to set a geographical limit, like, "every new paper regarding history within such-and-such a region", and then get alerts. In addition, even better would be geographically matching foreign-language journals (I'm thinking China, eg. http://www.kaogu.cn/)

Another thought: disconnect your thinking/pitch from email, it's just one delivery option within phone/web/email/rss/sms/xmpp/facebook/twitter/whatever.

Good points.

You are right I was just thinking about email. I will start thinking about other delivery options. People have different preferences, and by sticking to email only I would limit my userbase.

No. My backlog of to-read academic papers is long enough already, and I'm not keeping up with what I get. (I felt like I should interject some negativism ;)

It is important to get both positive and negative feedback.

How do you find papers to read, and how do you decide which ones to read?

It's obvious that it's impossible to stay current with all of the literature. The deluge of papers was a common complaint even back in the 1960s. Abstracting services like ISI started up to help handle that data flow. I've decided that it's not worth stressing out over it.

There are two primary journals for my field, cheminformatics. These are the "Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling" and "The Journal of Cheminformatics." There are several other journals which will publish on cheminformatics, such as "Algorithms for Molecular Biology."

I have subscribed to the monthly email announcement and/or RSS feeds for those journals.

I also learn about what's important by watching the blogs of others in my field. I going to conferences to see what people are using. For example, one conference I went to 1.5 years ago had several papers on using "Matched Molecular Pairs" (published in JCIM). I talk to people, and see what they are interested in ("Activity cliffs" being another recent hotness).

I'm very demand driven by what I read in depth. I scan the abstract, and only read further if it's something that interests me deeply. This could be something that I've worked in before, or something that I've thought about but haven't seen much in-depth work in. I'll mostly go into a paper when I need to do something related to that topic, which is also how I handle papers outside the field.

The field of course draws from many other fields. For those I use the approach that I do for buying computers: mostly ignore things but every once in a while read a paper and make sure I understand the key concepts. When I need to get into that field, dig up the literature and work on a task.

For example, one of the things I'm interested in involves postings lists. This is classic information retrieval, which I knew about from reading "Managing Gigabytes" and "Mining of Massive Dataasets." That was enough to be able to understand the literature when I did a search last summer.

> Are there any services like this that you are aware of?

I get some magazines/journals with my ACM membership, which are a mix of articles and selected research papers each month.

At only $99/year (student discount available) for membership and the monthly print magazine, it's quite affordable.

http://www.acm.org/publications

Thanks. I will take a look at what ACM provides.

Yes, Interested.

1. Receiving as daily email - will not prefer it instead would be interested in a weekly digest mail of top list (should also be section seperated)

2. Some way of intelligent sorting of good papers would be interesting

I think this is a interesting idea. A Facebook friend posted every day a paper about computer science for about 1 month. He said that he got a lot of positive feedback.

This is a very interesting idea. But I hope the service can be blog like (with simple review), so I can subscribe with rss.

sure, i would be interested. i'd like a short (3 sentences?) summary explaining why the paper is interesting and a pdf.

you can often find preprints on people's web sites even when the final paper is behind a paywall. and sometimes if you email the author they will send you a copy.

Would the paper abstract be enough? or you'd want an even more compressed summary?

What about both? :P

not the abstract. something more "explain it to a 5 year old" - so not exactly compressed, but simpler, with more background.

i don't think that this is so different to a blog, really. the hard bit is going to be consistency.

Thanks. I will look into finding preprints.

I was thinking about sending a short summary and a link.

I would be interested on a service like that

Are there any specific things you would want in such a service?

I only really read papers that relate to my field (storage systems, databases, distributed systems, etc). The other stuff might be interesting but I just don't have the time to really focus on it. I also tend to take a more "pull" approach to papers-- if the title or the abstract doesn't seem interesting, I won't read it. There's just way too many out there.

If you were somehow able to curate the list and present "the most important papers of 2012 for field X", it might be interesting. That's kind of what journals are supposed to do, I guess. I suppose you could consider your effort a kind of virtual journal then :)

I appreciate the feedback.

Initially, I was thinking about using the number of times a paper is cited as a way to curate the list. Over time, I can curate the list based on a specific reader's interests by sending related papers to the ones the user downloads.

You are right. Most professionals are too busy to spend time to find papers they are interested in besides the field they are working in. It is a time and discovery problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com