
ITunes for Research Papers - samratjp
http://www.mendeley.com/
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teaspoon
If people really do want to manage papers like they do music, I hope the
eventual upshot is something like an iTunes Store for journal articles. I
often want to purchase an individual paper that I'm interested in, but the
going rate for a PDF download from a commercial paper database (e.g.,
Elsevier) is currently around $25.

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.

~~~
pak
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 ;-)

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adw
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. :)

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jergason
This looks exactly like Papers (<http://mekentosj.com/papers/>) which is
fantastic.

edit: Missed the "free" part. Papers $40.

~~~
las3rjock
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> ).

~~~
zerokyuu
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.

~~~
corruption
Agreed, I dropped papers for mendeley and I'm recommending it to everyone.

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samratjp
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.

~~~
sandGorgon
upvotes for zotero - unfortunately, I have moved on to Chrome and zotero dont
workee in Chrome.

~~~
samratjp
Looks like the zotero team is no hurry to move to Chrome yet:
[http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3955/chrome-
compatibilit...](http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3955/chrome-
compatibility/)

And the official browser support page:
<http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/browser_compatibility>

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ssn
Previously known as "the last.fm for research". Why the change?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948316>

~~~
easyfrag
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.

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johngunderman
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 :)

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niekmaas
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.

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Specstacular
Wow, that could be sensational... will play with it this weekend...

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shrikant
Why can't I have multiple research/academic fields?

