Question for you!

[alexr_rwx]

Academic and studently sorts! What do you do with papers that other people wrote? You get this fresh shiny article, full of really important information that you're going to use or whatever...

Do you have them nicely organized in folders, by topic and author? Do you just delete them? Are they PDFs? postscript? Word docs?

What if you had something that was kind of iTunes-like, but for papers and slides and stuff, and you could sort and search and organize and have a central place to stash all of them? What if I wrote something like that, and it was cross-platform and easy to use and exciting and awesome?

Comments

[unitvector.livejournal.com]

I would love it forever and ever and get married to it in a different state.

[cola-fan.livejournal.com]

Make sure to check out Endnote, which is the commercial answer to question.

Also, it would be the best if you could somehow make it portable across machines...

What kind of functionality does bibtex provide? It would be a jukebox for papers. Maybe you could feed it into chuck to make music.

It is a good atlhacking project.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Hottt! So do you mostly work with PDFs, or do you get things in other formats? ...

[sault.livejournal.com]

> What if I wrote something like that, and it was cross-platform and easy to use and exciting and awesome?

I would probably have your child.

Conceptually, of course.

[agonistes]

I treat other people's criticism like I treat my men.

Love them and leave them. In the recycling bin.

What? I'm ecologically conscious!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Yes! I was thinking about EndNote a while ago, which probably got me considering the problem... Jacquie fluffyevilbunny was looking at managing bibliographies for a paper...

(although I think this isn't quite like EndNote, and it'd be easier to use than bibtex, which seems a bit esoteric for most users, me included... maybe it could generate citations and bibliographies too?)

Cross-platform is of the utmost importance! ATLhacking, yes! (sorry I didn't make it out, tonight -- I was mostly asleep for the evening...)

[neurochemistry.livejournal.com]

Paper management is quite an issue. I read tons of these things, and I am still trying to figure out how I want to handle them. I've heard a bunch about endnote, but I have never given it a go. There are several other paper management softwares out there, but I imagine one that allowed specialization of management style would be best.

Right now I'll probably stick to throwing them into a big pile on the floor. :)

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Lazy is a virtue! Computers should handle things like this!

Ooh; I hadn't thought about spreadsheets... this might have to be a much more general tool than I'd considered...

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be awesome! AND, if each "playlist" could be exported as a bibliography, a la Endnote (but actually functioning correctly, unlike Endnote), that would be wonderful. How would it capture the information? Connect to databases?

I primarily work with PDFs when I'm researching, with some Word documents thrown in. When I'm doing an experiment, there are spreadsheets and SPSS data files, but that's different and I'm not sure if you'd want to include that kind of stuff.

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

Conceptually, of course.

Hard to conceive of such a thing.

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

Are they PDFs? postscript? Word docs?

Yes.

Following the iTunes analogy, I'd like to have the ability to create a sort of "on the go playlist". While I'm viewing the documents in your program, if I could highlight sections and have them flagged/collected in another document (perhaps in the form of links to the original), that would be nifty. I typically print out all the papers I use for something and take a highlighter to the portions I want, but if there were an easy way to do this without involving dead trees, man...

Would it be possible for the program to identify unique language in each paper and scan your document for that language as a sort of "citation check"? Like, it also checks for common citation formats nearby, but if they're not there it says "This paragraph 70% match for 'Boron Carbide Applications' by Speyer, Robert. Add citation?" and gives you the chance to break out of the check cycle for a moment and add a citation.

I'm just thinking "outloud". Something to collect and organize papers would be wonderful in whatever form it takes.

[unitvector.livejournal.com]

PDFs or PSs. Usually astrophysicists like PSs because they use Linux, but they'll usually post PDF versions too.

I'm forwarding you my presentation right now. A lot of info is left out because I said it out loud in my presentation, but I'll send you the paper (not due until Monday!) when it's finished, if you want.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Would it be possible for the program to identify unique language in each paper and scan your document for that language as a sort of "citation check"?

Probably :) I would do that like this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model), and probably like this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis) too, which put together is just like "compare things using vectors and linear algebra and the blood of newts".

... would you want that if you had to do it as a separate step, though? Anyway, I think I might hold off on this feature, but it's a really interesting idea!

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

It was a seperate step in my mind. And the same sort of functionality might be useful in identifying connections between source documents; if you have a pool of papers that you've collected over time, useful connections between them might go unnoticed. If the program looks at all the documents dogeared for an active paper, it could see what they have in common (on a superficial level, at least) and look for that in other places. Wouldn't often yield tremendous insight, but it could be handy.

[sault.livejournal.com]

It's hard to bring off, to be sure, but whenever I've seen it happen, it's always done immaculately.

RefWorks

[(Anonymous)]

Try RefWorks. Like EndNote but Web-based and a few other differences. Adding features for file management soon. (If you are at a college or university, your library may provide RefWorks or EndNote for you ... check it out....)