Validation: Organizing Scientific Paper Research
I would like to work on a service that helps with the process of researching scientific papers using information from the browser history, presenting an overview over the visited papers and offering possibilities to organize and compare them.
It's definitely a problem that I came across during my studies and found no suitable tool that could do this work automatically.
I am looking for general feedback on the idea or any type of suggestion or remark you might have. What weaknesses do you see? Is there already a similar product out there? Would you use it?
Thank you very much!
The organization of research material is indeed a problem where there is still room for improvement. You have to study the existing reference management systems like Zotero and Mendeley carefully because they have a tone of features. And you have to support most of them if you want to provide a comparable experience for researchers otherwise they won't switch. Just to give you a clue getting a correct citation from a plain pdf or a website the researcher visited is not as trivial as you might think.
Hi, thanks four your reply! Yes, I am aware of the challenges when trying to extract text information from a PDF, that's definitely something that will take some time to implement.
The idea would be to have a product that is able to extract this type of information, as well as keywords and topics of the papers in order to make them comparable and provide a high-level overview. I am leaning towards deploying it as a website/browser extension.
Are you maybe aware of some product that is doing something similar?
Zotero adds 'Automatic Tags' in some cases: https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags
Topic Modelling plugin is already available for Zotero: http://papermachines.org/ Topic modeling is available to some commercial reference managers as a plugin or integrated feature already.
However, there is room for improvement in all cases.