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Ask HN: As of 2017 – best PDF/academic paper reader?

18 points by caycep ↗ HN
I guess its a sad state of affairs that the landscape has changed so much over past few years, but wondering what people were using to read/organize academic papers, i.e. from PubMed or ArXiv?

Mendeley - still developed, owned by Elsevier ReadCube? Papers (acquired by ReadCube...in limbo) DevonThink? iBooks? Zotero? flat files? Appears Sente is sunsetted..

8 comments

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notlob
For annotations and notes I love LiquidText (iOS only, http://liquidtext.net). It’s great for ebooks and longer reviews, has a nice “accordion” feature for comparing between distant pages, and can help produce nice summaries to share with others. File management is a pain, sufficient enough that I don’t use it for manuscripts. For those, I generally print them out and annotate directly. It’s really hard to beat paper.

For organization, I use BibDesk (http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net). I used Papers when it first came out, but for reasons relating to business practices I now forget I went back to BibDesk.

josephhardin
I just spent a fair bit of time on this question last week and here is my new setup. (Previously I used a mixture of mendeley with goodnotes and an Ipad pro with apple pencil).

Currently what I have moved to is using zotero on the desktop as the master store. This works well with the chrome and firefox plugins to auto add papers.

I use feedly to monitor RSS feeds for each journal from my phone, and then pull them up on the desktop once every so often to add to zotero. On the ipad pro with apple pencil I use papership to interface with the zotero library. It's annotations are usually good enough, but if I really need to do something fancy, I'll export it to pdfexpert, annotate it, then move it back in.

caycep
yeah, I suppose one really has to just play around with different setups to find one that fits.
m_ke
Download to dropbox then print and read on paper.
janerixo
I'm the former Mendeley founder, take a look at Kopernio (http://www.Kopernio.com) to access and read PDF journal articles with one click. It's my next project I'm working on, after getting fed up with "chasing PDFs" through the internet. It's an attempt to make reading of PDF journal articles much easier, and it integrates with Google Scholar and Pubmed.

And thanks for the support and nice words for Mendeley!

caycep
ah cool - will check it out, thanks!

Overall, not sure if you are able to speak about this, but has the Elsevier acquisition affected day to day development/operations of Mendeley, or is the team still relatively independent?