
Ask HN: How do you find and read academic papers? - ShaneCurran
I&#x27;m curious to find out how those of you who read academic papers (either professionally or recreationally) consume the plethora of available data sources.<p>Do you use Google Scholar and view the PDF&#x2F;PS document using a normal document viewer? Do you browse arXiv regularly and see what new research has been published?<p>Finally, would you use a simple tool for finding, reading and collating papers from the various sources? Would an automatic &quot;reference flow&quot; help, so that you can easily click through long chains of references and see how they interconnect? Would you pay for such a tool?
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Eridrus
I mostly find papers to peruse through Twitter & Reddit, they're mostly on
Arxiv. If I'm looking for something specific I use Google + Semantic Scholar.

I would be interested in a tool to help me get a sense for the "research
neighborhood" of a paper. Often I end up finding a paper, then looking up the
papers it references, and then finding the papers that reference that paper;
it's annoying and I'm sure I miss things.

Would I pay for it? Maybe. If it actually helped me find useful papers on the
topics I am actually working on (in industry), I would probably pay for it.
But the key word is useful; often I search for topics that I think "someone
must have worked on this problem before" I find approaches that are great for
getting papers published, but not really practical to apply.

What do you think? Is my haphazard approach missing papers that can be readily
applied, would having better tools help me find them?

Re reading & collating; I used Zotero for a while. It was ok on one computer,
didn't do anything on mobile (which matters since I read a good amount of
papers on my phone on the subway), and the need to manually categorize papers
sucked, if I wasn't careful I'd get one big "To Read" folder. Having something
that automatically organized the papers I'd found for me would be nice.

Would I pay for a better Zotero? Probably not. It felt good to catalog
interesting papers, but I didn't really find it super helpful. But I'm not an
academic, so I could see this being useful when needing to write citations.

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mostafab
I will not pay in any case

