
Show HN: Scholarref tools – never deal with journal webpages again - admsg
https://adamsgaard.dk/scholarref.html
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JorgeGT
> clicking the "Download PDF" link should redirect the user to an unusable in-
> browser PDF viewer

Pro tip: in Elsevier's case, middle-click the "Download PDF" link so it opens
in a new tab. Briefly avoid switching to that tab until it does some
redirects. Voilà, you get the actual PDF instead of the stupid viewer.

This looks like fantastic software btw, I wish more people would release their
tools as old school POSIX-style shell scripts instead of asking for hundreds
of MBs of dependencies or fancy electron GUIs.

~~~
btrettel
Which browser are you using for the Elsevier trick? This doesn't work for me
in Firefox.

Edit: Middle click doesn't work for me in Firefox, but opening in a new tab
via the right-click menu does.

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osamagirl69
Very neat, when I was writing my thesis I used zotero and its firefox
downloader plugin which was a heck of a lot better than dealing with the
biography process manually but still fairly manual (then again, so is the
process of finding references... I don't understand why, in 2019, people don't
include a DOI in their references) but this seems better still. That said,
this implementation in particular would not have worked well for me since, at
least for the journals I frequent, availability on scihub is patchy and even
for the journals which do have good coverage it takes a while for articles to
show up. Zotero has connectors for those journals and the auto-downloader
works pretty well until the journal rate limits you and requires a captcha for
each download.

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fghorow
I'm a refugee from the late, lamented CiteULike.

I have tried to like zotero and mendeley, but neither of them grab me like
C-U-L did.

Dinosaur that I am, I am currently using JabRef to maintain a BibTeX database,
semi-manually.

Now I'm going to have to play around with the ScholarRef scripts to see if
they replace/augment my current somewhat clunky method.

What have any other C-U-L refugees settled on?

~~~
tnhh
I am also a CUL refugee who is using JabRef after trying Zotero. Would be
interested to know if there are any other options.

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bronzecarnage
This is great! I did something similar for myself that also renames the input
pdf file based on metadata from CrossRef. Hopefully I can get around to
contributing code to this project.

~~~
admsg
That’s a great idea. Please do contribute if you get around to it.

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sjy
I’m pleased to see this as I have been working on some shell scripts for
managing a collection of research PDFs myself. But I think the headline’s a
little misleading. The scripts don’t do much more to help you avoid journal
webpages than feed a DOI into Sci-Hub. If the material you’re collecting isn’t
on Sci-Hub, or breaching the publisher’s copyright is likely to cause problems
for you at work, then these tools aren’t useful.

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hirenj
I really love the idea of ditching reference managers. The utility of these
three scripts (or something like them) really is demonstrated when on mobile.

RSS feeds, Twitter (or emails from colleagues) give me a raw list of papers to
read. Using the url of whatever journal webpage as a basis it then gets
converted to a doi by the Zotero translation server (hosted as a lambda on
AWS). From there its the crossref API to generate a filename for the PDF, and
then Elbakyan's resource to download the actual file (even though I'm usually
on an academic network that has full access, the scihub api is cleaner). All
this gets launched from the share sheet from the browser, and deposits files
in a cloud drive.

A little bit off topic, but could anyone explain to me the actual utility of a
reference manager if all your references have dois? I don't get what it
provides over a folder of PDFs with annotations?

~~~
btrettel
I use Zotero for references but keep the files in a separate organized
directory structure, where the filenames match the citation key in Zotero.
Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The largest advantage of the directories is speed. I don't need to wait for
Zotero to launch, and Zotero has gotten much clunkier over the years. (I think
they need to do an entire rewrite at this point.) I also have some bash
aliases to, for example, open a PDF file I have in my reference folder given
only the citation key.

Zotero is better for annotations, and other information associated with a
citation. I make very heavy use of the related documents pane. I also often
put citations in multiple folders in Zotero. That's a bit more complicated in
the directories as I need to add links and then maintain the links. (I have a
few shell scripts to help with the creation and maintenance of the links.)

Zotero also makes generating bibliographies in different formats easy. I
normally use BibLaTeX format, but a journal I'm submitting some things to
requires BibTeX. The conversion was dead simple in Zotero. If you manually
curate your bibliography file then this would be a pain.

Also, I have many citations in Zotero where I don't have a copy of the
document. Not all documents have DOIs, and not all documents have been
digitized. I use Zotero extensively when visiting the library so I can keep
track of which documents to scan.

~~~
SebiH
> I use Zotero for references but keep the files in a separate organized
> directory structure, where the filenames match the citation key in Zotero.
> Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Why not install the Zotfile plugin [1]? You can configure it to do exactly
that, and point it to a Dropbox folder to get better synchronisation between
devices.

[1]: [http://zotfile.com/](http://zotfile.com/)

~~~
btrettel
I wasn't aware of Zotfile. I'll take a look. Thanks. Hopefully it has some way
to automatically associate with ~10,000 files...

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vestingz
Thanks, it looks really helpful. I made an AUR package here:
[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/scholarref-
git/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/scholarref-git/)

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ska
This looks useful but one thing I've found is that with papers with multiple
meta-data sources, some sources are much better than others. That and chasing
down references without DOI, probably leads me back to zotero pretty quickly.

~~~
btrettel
Yes, I frequently encounter references which have no DOI and often aren't even
online. A system which is based entirely around DOIs is going to be of limited
utility to me.

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Cenk
FYI Elsevier doesn’t like people linking to Sci-Hub:
[https://boingboing.net/2019/08/02/publicsphere-v-
elsevier.ht...](https://boingboing.net/2019/08/02/publicsphere-v-
elsevier.html)

