DX as a Scientific Paper Cornucopia

[braver]

I'm new here but saw this site several times. Now am going to visit more frequently as I'm evaluating the DX for replacement of a multi-thousand-page thick library of scientific papers!

Yep, I've got the DX primarily to streamline my collection of real scientific papers, which are in PDF. Most of them are two-column ones, such as

http://memetracker.org/quotes-kdd09.pdf

Now it's hard to read it vertically, but it's OK in landscape. I wish I could automatically split each two-column page into 2 single pages.

Some other impressions: I got the Amazon leather cover for it and it's extremely handy when reading while walking, and in general. It's hard to grasp the Kindle while walking without hitting some keys.

Another tip is, get the replacement USB cable for office, so you have one at each location where you'd be tempted to transfer files from the computer.

The best thing which could happen to science is when the Papers application,

http://mekentosj.com/papers/

will work with the DX to leverage their amazing management of individual PDFs. It already syncs to the iPhone, wirelessly and beautifully, and they are waiting for Amazon to reply to their proposal to develop for Kindle. I suggest all of us with interest in PDF management for mobile reading voice our desire for it, along with the folders, to AMZN!

Cheers,
Alexy

[Slow_hand]

Too bad I've seen a lot of scientific articles with the super resolution PDF and high res color graphics which I doubt the DX can do (much less the ones with animations). Then again, it's just a matter of time.

[emellaich]

Originally Posted by braver

The best thing which could happen to science is when the Papers application,

http://mekentosj.com/papers/

Looks interesting, but ...

You might also want to check out Zotero (http://www.zotero.org).

Zotero is a free and open source plugin for firefox developed by George Mason University and funded by the Andrew Mellon Organization.

Its angle on this space is as an alternative to end notes so it handles citation management and bibliographies. It has really nice integration with most libraries so you can have a one-click citation memorization. It also allows you to store papers in its database so you can use tagging and the citation management system to store and find your articles.

Even things that can't be stored in its database, like physical books, are stored through the citation index. And its handling of web pages is also great.

However, its real strength is its synchronization. You can pull up your database from home or from work and it automatically synchs. Even better yet, if you are collaborating, you can share a library automatically with your colleagues.

Finally, as a Firefox plugin it is cross-platform.

And, did I mention that it is free?

[braver]

Zotero is definitely a competitor to Papers, as is Mendeley:

http://www.mendeley.com/

-- it provides clients for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, as well as the cloud sharing.

Yet I find Papers the most thought-out one at the moment... Either of those integrating with a Kindle will bring about the revolution in scientific paper management.

[catsittingstill]

so, can you search across multiple pdfs for a particular phrase within the text? For instance, if you wanted to see every paper that talked about memes, could you use "memes" as your search text and see a list of all pdfs that have "memes" in the text in order from most references to least?

Last I heard searching across pdfs wasn't possible with the DX but if that has changed I may give serious consideration to getting one.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by braver

... I got the Amazon leather cover for it and it's extremely handy when reading while walking, and in general. ...

The Kindle cover is nice, but some users have launched a lawsuit against Amazon claiming it can cause screen breakage.

I've posted my Velcro solution in a new thread at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...226#post615226.

[ziegl027]

I'm interested in this thread because I am largely interested in a reader as a scientific article management tool, too. Well, and knitting patterns. I had initially discounted the DX because you couldn't take notes on PDF's. Heard from a variety of sources that you CAN, as long as you convert the files. I pooh-poohed that since I didn't want to bother converting files. Turns out that most things that I was looking at like Sony Touch (unless you want to spring for an IRex) will suck at PDF's unless you convert them, anyway.

So I'm back looking at Kindle DX. If I have to convert the mother-loving files regardless, I'd just as soon have the larger format. My eyes aren't getting any better as I age.

Many of the "you can convert the files" folks praised Calibre as both file conversion and management/organization. How happy have people been using it to manage scientific journal articles? Note that I do not really need to manage files for endnotes and such, it's for professional keeping-up-with-the-Jones' reading, not research documentation.