I find it amusing that you are complaining about not having a computer to click a link while glossing over the fact that you need a computer to use a link at all.
This use case of "I have a paper journal and no PDF but a computer with a web browser" seems extraordinarily contrived. I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. If we cared, we'd use a QR code.
This kind of luddite behavior sometimes makes using this site exhausting.
Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though.
Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc.
Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)?
Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia.
>Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though.
I just had a really warm feeling of nostalgia reading that! I was a pretty average student, and the material was sometimes dull, but the coffee was nice, life had little stress (in comparison) and everything felt good. I forgot about those times haha. Thanks!
> I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs.
This is by no means a universal experience.
People still get printed journals. Libraries still stock them. Some folks print out reference materials from a PDF to take to class or a meeting or whatnot.
I’m unconvinced the researchers acted irresponsibly. If anything, a Google-shortened link looks—at first glance—more reliable than a PDF hosted god knows where.
There are always dependencies in citations. Unless a paper comes with its citations embedded, splitting hairs between why one untrustworthy provider is more untrustworthy than another is silly.
I feel like all that is beyond the point. People used goo.gl because they largely are not tech specialists and aren't really aware of link rot or of a Google decision rendering those links unaccessible.
> People used goo.gl because they largely are not tech specialists and aren't really aware of link rot or of a Google decision rendering those links unaccessible.
Anyone who is savvy enough to put a link in a document is well-aware of the fact that links don't work forever, because anyone who has ever clicked a link from a document has encountered a dead link. It's not 2005 anymore, the internet has accumulated plenty of dead links.
