My wife recently started her PhD and while she uses Zotero as a citation manager, she was really missing a tool for keeping track of what she's reading right now/has already read/needs to read next. This overwhelming experience might be familiar to other researchers working on a niche field where every paper is called pretty much the same thing
So I built her Paperstack. It's basically Goodreads, but for research papers:
- Save articles to familiar To Read/Reading/Read stacks
- Tag articles with logical projects/chapters/whatever your system is
- Get AI-generated summaries so you can quickly decide if a paper is worth your time
I would love feedback from any students and researchers managing paper overwhelm!
Quick thoughts:
- I would like a "not read" stack, for papers that I peeked at but decided against reading.
- The registration link took a few minutes to come in, I thought something was broken.
- I keep trying to click the stack titles to take me into the stacks, but they aren't clickable.
- I couldn't figure out how to use a summary credits
- I couldn't figure out how to search/export my notes and tags
- I would like a way to quickly see my own 1-line summaries of the papers I have read. Maybe under the titles/authors.
---
Long Thoughts:
What does this do that a "to-read" folder on Zotero doesn't? This post made me ask myself why I don't just use the to-read folder I already set up in Zotero.
1) Adding something to zotero is a bit of a process, and feels like I have to be 100% committed to reading it, and thus I hesitate to put the "I'll check it out later" papers into my to-read folder on zotero. Your website is much more focused and low-effort to use.
2) I often forget why I wanted to read something in the first place. I like to store items on my to-read list according to the parent paper I discovered them in, to remember what I was doing when I added them to the list. Zotero notes/relations are not the easiest way to do this, so I stick to a markdown list.
3) My to-read list is so long, with so many papers from 2 years ago that I didn't end up needing, that I don't know where to start when I look at it. It would be nice to have a way to rank papers on my list by priority, or group them by topic tags, etc.