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Google Scholar PDF Reader
- alecco 2y agoMost important papers can be read with highlighting at https://www.semanticscholar.org/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/ (PDF Semantic Reader, skimming assist)
- jccalhoun 2y agoIt is really nice to see google scholar get some attention. It is essential for a lot of academics and it would be horrible if google "sunset"ed it.
- bitcharmer 2y ago[flagged]
- superkuh 2y agoThat's nice and all, but google scholar recently removed all the 'cited by' 'related articles' and other links from the HTML pages of google scholar. It was like this for about two months before they restored the functionality. It likely they will remove it again soon. Google scholar is getting worse, not better. The google devs have no idea what a typical academic's computer is like around the world. They dev for their lived experience and it's just not applicable. A javascript (slow, computationally expensive) pdf reader is just another aspect of this ignorance.
- adolph 2y agoA js pdf reader they control has monetization possibilities. Slip in an interstitial page for Naturally Fun Arkansas with an article from Nature. You don't want scholar going the way of reader do you?
- xnacly 2y agoI couldn’t agree more, I dont want you displaying the pdf, let me download the file and view it with zathura
- adr1an 2y agoOr Sioyek (vim keybindings!), Okular, Xournalpp, Zotero, ...
- newzisforsukas 2y agoWhat are the base hardware requirements for a JavaScript PDF reader where it isn't "slow"?
- google234123 2y agoAre you sure this actually happened? I never noticed this. can anyone else collaborate? Maybe you installed some extension that messed with the html
- superkuh 2y agoYes, I confirmed it with 3 other people on IRC a couple months ago. I didn't know google scholar had restored it until I checked right before I wrote the above post. I thought the links were still gone. They had been the last time I'd used google scholar about 3 weeks ago. Back then I also confirmed it myself first using 3 different computers, 4 browsers (with JS disabled), coming from 3 different IP addresses, both logged in to google and logged out. I probably wouldn't have started writing the post at all if I didn't think they were still gone. I figure in addition to the feedback they received from me (and presumably others) at the time they saw a drop in usage and restored the functional version. But they'll try again.
- google234123 2y agoI think you are wrong - I don't recall seeing this. Screenshots of scholar on twitter from feb, jan, dec all show those links
- superkuh 2y agoCheck at 2024 Feb 08 09:54:00 (am) CST. I definitely didn't confabulate the memory because the initial conversation about it (with others) is in my IRC logs. Sorry I don't have any screenshots of my own. Perhaps it was A/B testing or something.
- lukeinator42 2y agoAlongside this, I have found that Google Scholar's search has become noticeably worse in the last year or so. I can search for an author's name and a few keywords from a paper title and it won't show up, even if the paper has like 5000 citations.
- malshe 2y agoWow so I am not going mad! I had the same experience and it almost feels like Google is trying to recommend me papers based on my past searches. I hope they revert to their earlier algorithm
- smeeth 2y agoCheck out https://openalex.org https://openalex.org I'm pretty optimistic that by the time google scholar really goes to shit they'll be good enough to pick up the slack.
- sorenjan 2y agoDoes anyone have any recommendations for good local PDF readers for Windows? I've been reading a lot of various papers recently, and clicking on a citation in Acrobat reader is very frustrating. The document scrolls to show the citation in view, but doesn't clearly show it in the long list that most papers have, and then I have to scroll up to where I was since it doesn't seem to have a working back feature.
- drmaximus 2y agoSioyek is a PDF viewer designed exactly for reading research papers and textbooks: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek.
- wslh 2y agoI am interested in knowing why and how Google Chrome is not enough?
- ttul 2y agoNow all they need is a way to grab documents from SciHub..
- abhayhegde 2y agoThis looks great! Since they link it all to one's Gmail account, I wonder if they implement saving annotations to these PDFs and have them live on your Drive or elsewhere. Edit: Also, Chrome now defaults to this extension for rendering any PDFs you load.
- meekaaku 2y agoDoes anyone know of a library (or reading material) that can render a pdf (mostly architectural drawings) on to webgl canvas as actual vectors not image?
- me_jumper 2y agoNot sure if that's what you are looking for but mupdf can render to SVG.
- gcr 2y agoWebGL is inherently a vector-to-raster technology, it’s always backed by a pixel buffer. One might argue that even PDFjs works this way with its calls to the canvas API. What are you trying to do? Why is webgl the key here?
- meekaaku 2y agoBasically I am looking to render pdf of architectural drawings onto webgl (because 2d context is too slow), and maintain the vector information in the drawings (ie lines, arcs). I know webgl is eventually raster, but I want to pan/zoom while retaining the crispness of vector lines.
- lxgr 2y agoLooks great, but can you imagine Google pulling the rug under an academic's document/citation database? I don't even want to imagine having to migrate all annotations and citations to something else when they inevitably pull the plug on it some years down the road.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- resolutebat 2y agoHuh? This tool just parses PDFs, it doesn't require academics to actually do anything.
- SamBam 2y agoHas anyone tried installing this? It says "PDFs on all sites will have a new look in Chrome." This makes me nervous. I'm often looking at PDFs that are embedded in a page (either grad school software for commenting on PDFs, or publishers' sites). Is it going to play nicely with those? Is this only for navigating directly to a PDF?
- gnicholas 2y agoMy guess (as someone whose company makes a PDF extension for Chrome) is that it may intercept embedded PDFs as well. Sometimes sites use iframes or the like, and those get intercepted. But if the PDF is displayed through some sort of third party tool then it would be unaffected. Just my 2¢!
- cygnion 2y agoCapturing and visualizing research knowledge is personally an exciting space. I feel that deep reading and absorbing content continues to be challenging, due to the ever-increasing amount of published research, rudimentary reading apps (Google PDF reader finally addressing issue with easily looking up references), and due to somewhat disconnected tools for reading and note-taking. Similar to the readers piggy-backing on the PDFjs library, I've developed an app that helps me capture and organize personal research knowledge [1]. Additionally, visualizations and customizable contexts for notes help to recall and link information. [1] https://www.knowledgegarden.io/ https://www.knowledgegarden.io/
- chipdart 2y agoZotero does a good job at it, doesn't it?
- KingMob 2y agoAs a daily Zotero user, not really. The nicest thing I can say about it is, it has plugins and is FOSS. Maybe the new 7.0 release will blow me away, but I've been waiting for it to get out of beta forever. More fundamentally, we need to stop disseminating scholarly work as PDFs, a format primarily designed for print. Plain HTML would be an improvement. Even better than HTML would be an extended variant with scholarly-specific semantic markup and universal, animated, explorable figures. Embedded notebooks would be cool, too, but disseminating data would still be a major challenge. (And I don't just mean storage/transfer; a lot of researchers are reluctant to share source data to the world.)
- Unlisted6446 2y agoSo I'm a researcher that almost always uses pdfs... Does HTML have the reproducibility that PDF promises? My feeling is that if I store a PDF, it'll look the same in a decade. But is HTML the same way? It seems like it relies on the web browser and many other things... How would one manage things like images and gifs? Is there a way to keep everything into one HTML file that's easily shareable and feels secure?
- antimora 2y agoCan someone recommend an app for ipad that can read PDFs? I want to be able to bookmark using my browser but read it on my ipad. Sort of like "Save to pocket" extension.
- buildbot 2y agoIn theory the built in files app will work for this. However, I like goodnotes, which has good highlighting snd library support. I’ve used it since grad school for reading papers.
- Tortoise 2y agoI really like PDF Expert for this. It's free. They have a subscription for some editing/advanced features, which I haven't tried. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pdf-expert-editor-reader/id743974925 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pdf-expert-editor-reader/id743...
- kristjansson 2y agoZotero w/ their first-party storage is the best I've found.
- dunham 2y agoPrimarily I've been using Zotero and Notability. They each have "save to" on mobile. Zotero has a chrome plugin that requires the desktop app to be running. They both optionally support a dark mode for reading in the dark. I like the experience of reading in Muse.app on the iPad. It's a nested whiteboarding thing, but also can act as a PDF reader. (It'll let you pull out chunks of the PDF and put it on your canvas with a link back into your document, if that fits your flow.) I often read on my phone, so this is not an option for me. Apple Notes and Muse slow down with a lot of ink. For taking a page full of notes I'm using Notability. I've heard good things about GoodReader, but haven't played with it in years.
- hedora 2y agoSquare icon with up arrow sticking out of it -> Save to books. It seems to work in MacOS and iOS; an iCloud account is probably required.
- kennydude 2y agoI just wish Google Scholar would be a bit more open in terms of debugging why a site isn't picked up by the platform
- mixedmath 2y agoI would also be interested to know how they decide to pick up a site. I was very surprised to learn that a technical note posted only to my website was picked up somehow. (I am a mathematician and so there are other things on my site, but it’s some custom static site generator thing and I’m still astounded).
- jinay 2y agoDoes anyone have a research paper reading tool they're happy with? Zotero is what meets most of my needs but I wish I could organize the papers faster and I wish the annotation tools were better. AI-assisted reading is a plus too.
- mixedmath 2y agoWhat does AI assisted reading mean to you?
- jinay 2y agoThose "chat with a PDF" apps get me halfway there, but I'm more imagining something that can explain certain terms in the context of the paper, or automatically dive into the citations and pull explanations from them too.
- gillesjacobs 2y agoMendeley beat Zotero for me with automatic pdf renaming, organising and its highlight and note taking tools in the reader. The Elsevier account integration is disgusting though, and I hate the idea of using all Elsevier product.
- felipefar 2y agoWhat do you like about organization in Mendeley?
- gillesjacobs 2y agoEver since the big UX app overhaul there is not much to like regarding functionality. They removed the pdf renaming and some other major automated file mgmt features from mendeley. Other than that the commenting and note reader UI was pretty good. And overall UI/UX felt more modern than Zotero, also free (as in beer) cloud backup. Today I had to do some literature review, and I reinstalled Zotero 7beta because I am not happy with the removed functionality from Mendeley.
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- gnicholas 2y agoI've never seen so many light/dark modes before. There's Device Mode, Light Mode, Dark Mode, and Night Mode. AFAICT Device Mode follows the browser/device's current setting, Dark Mode makes the sidebar dark but doesn't change the PDF, and Night Mode darkens both the sidebar and the PDF. I wonder how they decided to have so many modes?
- gcr 2y agoI’ve seen other apps that have Systen, Light, Dark, and “Very Datk” for OLED devices, so it isn’t out of the question
- chankstein38 2y agoDid you put "Very Datk" in quotes because it was spelled like that where you saw it? Or is it just "Very Dark" and it's quotes because it doesn't fully imply what you get?
- gcr 2y agoi put it in quotes because it's a funny i've variously seen apps call this "Extra Dark," "Midnight mode," "OLED dark," "Pure Black", ...
- Kwpolska 2y agoAutomatically applying dark mode to documents tends to have poor results, especially when images are involved, but some people are masochists and/or can't be bothered to turn on the light, so they made a separate setting for them. Although I think a toggle would be better instead of dark mode/night mode.
- ur-whale 2y ago> Scholar PDF Reader is available as a Chrome browser extension So it's a closed ecosystem for now ... pass.
- smburdick 2y agoFor me, reading papers requires deep focus. I have to have it physically printed out if I'm going to really read the whole thing.
- ildon 2y agoI suggest you try new devices to read papers. Often the perception that paper is a better support is due to a lack of more convenient devices. Paper is better than a 15'' screen for sure, for many reasons including size and posture while reading. But have you tried larger screens (> 27''), large tablets (>= A4) or as large as possible E-Ink readers? Depending on your preferences, you might find that some of these work actually better than paper also for you :-)
- benrapscallion 2y agoRemarkable 2 tablet is very good for reading papers.
- ykonstant 2y agoThere is no way I can perceive reading on an expensive device as more comfortable than paper. Paper is fairly cheap, lightweight and resilient; I can carry it around, fold it, toss it aside, sit on it by accident while thinking, annotate it with scribbles, and pour coffee on it with aplomb and finesse. I can flip it, half-tear it in anger, drool on it when I reach my brain capacity. I can take it hiking with me without fear of breaking or losing it. In other words, paper is a tool that gets out of my way. I did try all the devices you listed above, even had my department pay serious money, and ended up barely using them for all those reasons. I am a mathematician, I am clumsy and I want to focus on my problem-solving; I want to think, and babysitting devices and tools is not what I want to spend my brainspace on.
- serial_dev 2y ago"But did you think about the environment? Why don't you by a new device every 2 years with Lithium battery and full of non recyclable plastic in it" ... is what I get told all the time.
- pyromaker 2y agoI use a tool called Scholars https://www.scholars.io https://www.scholars.io Let you import and read PDF directly, annotate, comment and share with people.
- eviks 2y ago> You can focus on absorbing the scholarship – the format is simple and clean. Unless you need to scroll left and right on your phone instead of absorbing
- nothrowaways 2y ago"..have long loved PDFs" not.
- modeless 2y agoHmm, nice to have direct links to references. But the PDF rendering itself seems not as good as the native renderer.
- lordswork 2y agoJust tried it and didn't notice any significant differences in PDF rendering myself. Do you have any concrete examples?
- notsahil 2y agoZotero is the one I use but found this one useful too: https://synthical.com/ https://synthical.com/
- nprateem 2y agoHa ha lol. Is that really the best they can think of in an age of AI? Instead of turning PDFs into web pages how about some actually useful tools: * Summarisation * Succinctly placing the research in context of the broader field * Highlighting limitations or flaws in research methods, etc. * An outline view to summarise each paragraph/section and then drill down into the ones you actually want to read in more detail * Rephrasing into plain English. A lot of academics enjoy sounding clever and usling long words so it'd be nice to be able to switch off "ego mode" and just read stuff in plain English instead of having to wade through their word-soup. With more effort maybe Google could create a PDF reader that is actually innovative.
- vasco 2y agoThe friends I have in academia say that their PhD professors tell them to use "ego mode" or papers won't pass review and be accepted. I'm with you though. And it's not about specific jargon of a field, it's just wankery. Most lawyers do the same thing and you need to get extremely good ones to write good contracts in clear language. "Sounding smarter through obscurity"
- nprateem 2y agoYeah I'm sure that's true. It'd be nice to be able to opt out though while you're in the first pass research phase.
- benrapscallion 2y agoCan someone recommend lightweight alternatives to Paperpile or EndNote that have two essential features: 1. Rename a PDF file to a consistent (Author Year Journal) format. 2. Online sync (Mac, iOS and web access) - including via say iCloud or Dropbox. Maybe this just needs a script? I just paid $100 for EndNote 21 yesterday and don’t think these needs justify that cost.
- zoizoi 2y agoMaybe try Zotero[1]. There are many addons which can do what you need. [1]https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/
- jwr 2y agoAlready counting the days until this inevitably gets killed. I've been burned too many times to rely on Google for anything, except tracking me and pushing ads, which they indeed do better every day.
- LightBug1 2y ago[flagged]
- coeus77 2y agoWhere did you see the announcement they sunset it?
- ddalex 2y agoIn an effort to accelerate the development life-cycle, Google will now release sunset announcements before the product release.
- blagie 2y agoI saw that announcement, but I thought they changed their mind about a week before it was announced?
- halfmatthalfcat 2y agoThey're sunsetting the sunset?
- occamrazor 2y agoScholar is heavily used internally, it’s unlikely to be discontinued even if it has never brought any money to Google.
- kadoban 2y agoThis is about a PDF reader though, not Google Scholar itself.
- chombier 2y agoSo I guess this a way for Google to gather (more/fine-grain) data on paper skimming/research interest?
- woctordho 2y agoWhen can we have a PDF reader where we can hover over a symbol and see its definition?
- lordswork 2y agoWhat kind of symbol?
- RandomWorker 2y agoAlt+<- brings you back to where you were after clicking on a reference. You can skip around pretty easily to see the referenced object and this overlay does seem kinda interesting it’s not something crucial.
- orsenthil 2y agoI use an extension called histre, https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ for annotation and keeping up with _notes_ / _thoughts_ inline. I found that using tools like Fermat's Library, which provides side bar annotation, histre for inline highlight, annotation and multi-references, and ChatGPT to understand complex terms, all helped with understand recent papers. Even a medical journal paper, https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2023/10/21/medical-journal-paper-on-stroke.html https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2023/10/21/medical-... for me, in one instance.
- orsenthil 2y agoI tried Google Scholar after this comment. Google Scholar PDF is a valuable addition to the research community. There isn't any tool that can give direct hyperlink to the references in the research paper, and this does it, as inline hover, and it is incredibly useful to navigate and follow the references.
- lenkite 2y agoThis will be in the Google Graveyard https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ by mid-2026.