ITunes for Research Papers(mendeley.com)
mendeley.com
ITunes for Research Papers
http://www.mendeley.com/
9 comments
The process of buying research articles could greatly use some centralization, period. Right now it's a muck of confusing, widely different websites with completely different rules and interfaces for finding and downloading papers. If you have the "benefit" of institution-wide access to get free papers, you are then forced to access everything through your institution's proxy, which layers on more kludge and slowness.
Pubmed and later Google Scholar provided the first great leap in allowing article citations to be found quickly from a centralized database. But generally you had to grab this citation and then trudge through the journal's article search interface via your institution's proxy to then retrieve the actual paper. Being able to click Buy Now, or Access Now, and get the actual paper via a flexible authentication system that works across institutions, would be the next revolution. I don't see any indicator that journals are moving to build this, though, so we are indefinitely stuck with an endless patchwork of incompatible e-commerce sites and institutional proxies.
The result is that a bucketload of undergrads are still stuck collecting PDF's via the gateways as their daily drudgework, allowing primary investigators in universities around the country to put off finding actual labwork for the undergrads to do ;-)
Pubmed and later Google Scholar provided the first great leap in allowing article citations to be found quickly from a centralized database. But generally you had to grab this citation and then trudge through the journal's article search interface via your institution's proxy to then retrieve the actual paper. Being able to click Buy Now, or Access Now, and get the actual paper via a flexible authentication system that works across institutions, would be the next revolution. I don't see any indicator that journals are moving to build this, though, so we are indefinitely stuck with an endless patchwork of incompatible e-commerce sites and institutional proxies.
The result is that a bucketload of undergrads are still stuck collecting PDF's via the gateways as their daily drudgework, allowing primary investigators in universities around the country to put off finding actual labwork for the undergrads to do ;-)
I am sure there are many in the industry who have similar needs such as yours and wouldn't mind this idea at all. What would be nice is that if the platform had tools for peer review, revision control, etc.
There are a bunch of HN startups in the same building as these guys, including us at Timetric (http://timetric.com/), Smarkets (http://smarkets.com/) and Rjdj (http://rjdj.me/).
London is coming. :)
London is coming. :)
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This looks exactly like Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) which is fantastic.
edit: Missed the "free" part. Papers $40.
edit: Missed the "free" part. Papers $40.
If you're willing to shell out a few bucks, I highly recommend mekentosj's Papers over Mendeley. Among the free options, I prefer CiteULike (web-based; http://www.citeulike.org ) or Bibdesk (Mac OS X; http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net ).
I had used Papers for a couple years off and on. I really thought it was worth the money, but after I discovered Mendeley, I found it more useful. The built in synchronization of Mendeley works better than using Papers + Dropbox (which didn't work well). Importing papers seemed easier with Mendeley and a browser. Also, I have a couple of personal Macs and an Ubuntu box at work and it's nice to be able to run Mendeley on both.
I might not be up to date on all the features of Papers but I am pretty sure they never added a better way to sync between computers.
I might not be up to date on all the features of Papers but I am pretty sure they never added a better way to sync between computers.
Agreed, I dropped papers for mendeley and I'm recommending it to everyone.
The biggest problem with Papers is citations. Or better, the lack of a decent citation manager. Papers works good for sorting articles. But for most researchers the endproduct is an article with citations. I found it really hard to use Papers in combination with other citation managers.
In the last release Papers did add the possibility for citation export to Word, however managing the styling for different journals was far from ideal. I hope Mendeley will solve this for me.
In the last release Papers did add the possibility for citation export to Word, however managing the styling for different journals was far from ideal. I hope Mendeley will solve this for me.
It's free and cross-platform with collaboration and annotation features ... yep, Papers was a waste of money (Papers did finally fix the bug, so it starts without crashing now that I don't use it).
On the other hand signing up created a public social network profile, subscribed me to a newsletter and updates, and seems to offer no way to delete the account. Great, I just wanted to play with the software.
On the other hand signing up created a public social network profile, subscribed me to a newsletter and updates, and seems to offer no way to delete the account. Great, I just wanted to play with the software.
I've used Papers for a while and it's great.
Came across it when I got lazy with managing citations and just organizing research data. Endnote does citations fine, but Mendeley is much nicer to organize snippets with. Get firefox add-on Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) to one-click page to be added to Mendeley, which then greps all sorts of useful stuff like abstracts, authors, vitals, etc.
Another Zotero user here with one foot in Firefox and another in Chrome.
upvotes for zotero - unfortunately, I have moved on to Chrome and zotero dont workee in Chrome.
Looks like the zotero team is no hurry to move to Chrome yet:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3955/chrome-compatibilit...
And the official browser support page: http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/browser_compatibility
And the official browser support page: http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/browser_compatibility
Previously known as "the last.fm for research".
Why the change?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948316
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948316
More people are aware of iTunes? Plus it seems to offer download and catalog files similar to what you can do to media files in iTunes.
Hm. The download link states "Available for Windows and Mac", yet the screenshot on the download page shows it being run in Ubuntu. Is there actually some hidden Linux version and I am just missing something?
EDIT: I just realized it says "also available for". Ignore my ignorance :)
EDIT: I just realized it says "also available for". Ignore my ignorance :)
Smart move to launch it on a friday. Friday is usually the semi-slacking day for researchers. Most of them (includig me) don't mind playing around with something like this on a friday.
Wow, that could be sensational... will play with it this weekend...
Why can't I have multiple research/academic fields?
I doubt these prices face much market pressure since universities generally purchase institution-wide access; papers in those databases can be downloaded freely by anyone on the university network. I'll bet that people like me, not currently affiliated with any school, make up a tiny fraction of their market.