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Better content extraction and PDF attachment for academic papers


ninethirty

Idea

I searched for this, but didn't find it. But please let me know if it's a duplicate.

I'm looking to see if I can use Evernote more, possibly replacing some other tools that I use often. One is Papers, a Mac app that handles academic papers really well. One key thing that Papers does that Evernote doesn't is to apply smart content extraction for sites that host academic papers. For example, if I import a URL like: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08835 in Papers, it will: 
1. Title the note with the title of the paper ("Deep Forest: Towards An Alternative to Deep Neural Networks", in this case) 
2. Set the author and date appropriately 
3. Set other citation information as appropriate, so that it can easily generate a bibliography later. 
4. Download and attach the PDF of the paper itself. 

 
It can do this because arxiv.org is a very popular site for hosting academic research, so it can apply some simple rules based on the layout of the site when importing the paper.
Now, actually being able to generate bibliographies would be a bigger feature request within the Evernote app itself, I assume. Less important for me right now, although I'm sure other academics would love it. But #1, 2, and 4 would be fantastic.  #4 is the key one for me: I want to be able to hit "clip" on that page, and have Evernote download the PDF and attach it. 
I can work around it right now by opening the PDF itself and clipping that, but then I don't get any of the context information: title, author, citation, etc. Evernote just saves it with the title of "PDF - arxiv.org" and an attachment named "1702.08835.pdf", which is the actual filename but is opaque and useless. I have to copy the title from the HTML page, then click through to the PDF, clip to Evernote, and then manually rename the note that I clipped, every time. Since I might do this 20 times in a row as I go through a bibliography, this gets really tedious. Even moreso if I try to capture author information, date, etc. It's a lot of steps that could be easily automated. That's one of the simple things that makes apps like Papers, Zotero or Mendeley so attractive for academics, instead of Evernote. 
Similarly, I could clip the HTML page and then manually download and attach the PDF, but that's just as tedious, and also a lot of steps that could be easily automated. 

For the time being, I'll just keep using Papers, because it's an easy workflow that works really well. But I'd like to be able to use Evernote for this. Especially because I'd like to migrate off of Macs in the future, and Evernote is cross-platform. And since it seems to already have some context-dependent extraction logic for other sites (linkedin, facebook, ...) it seems like this would be feasible to add....
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Hi.  Here's a note I made for myself a while ago...
 

Quote

 

Reference Manager apps are for those who want to organise a lot of paper,  probably in a heavily technical or academic setting,  and probably for lots of colleagues.

The three leaders in the market (although there are many others) seem to be Docear,  Mendeley and Zotero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

To understand more about this (and only if you have some time for serious reading...) go to

Reference Managers: Mendeley vs. Zotero vs. Docear - http://www.docear.org/2014/01/15/comprehensive-comparison-of-reference-managers-mendeley-vs-zotero-vs-docear/

and,  if you have even more time...

What makes a bad reference manager? - http://www.docear.org/2013/10/14/what-makes-a-bad-reference-manager/

 

I'd not heard of Papers before now (don't move in these sorts of circle...) but I'll add it to my list - thanks.

With four very well established and highly effective competitors already in the market though,  I would have thought that adding these functionalities would

  1. vastly complicate Evernote's menu structure
  2. take some considerable time to research and develop
  3. detract from existing bug fixes and a long list of requested features
  4. cost Evernote a great deal of money

 

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