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.

[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!

[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. :)

[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]

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.

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....)