I'm not looking to get on a call but my pain points are as follows:<p>I hate reviewing the literature, it's too hard to organize and my workflow is terrible. I've tried different managers (zotero, mendeley), their add-ons, and search websites (google scholar, paperscape, others ...). I can never keep things organized and my train of thought is always getting interrupted by context switches. It takes like 10 clicks to open a paper and by then I don't even remember why the current paper cited it.
I wish I could just click any citation in any paper and it'd directly open a new tab with the cited paper.
Also I hate navigating single papers, the back button doesn't always work after clicking on a citation link depending in what piece of software it's open, I often lose my place when looking back for specific information. I don't know that there is a technical solution to this.<p>I also feel that I'm always missing papers when I search for those relevant to a problem, it's like I'm manually doing a union of sets of citations weighed by how relevant they are but when I talk to colleagues with knowledge of the problem they always come back to me with some that I didn't know about. The search websites are all relatively slow and pretty basic, they don't make me confident that I'm finding everything I should be. I'll often look up conferences' accepted papers listings for keywords and find things I didn't find through google scholar for example.<p>I wish there was a way to more easily highlight labs and their specialties. I have no idea what the solution to this would look like. I find that through practice I built an intuition of what the good labs were and what they worked on and what their biases were but I wish there was something to help with this. Maybe something to colour code author names so I don't have to parse dozens of hard to read names looking for familiar ones.<p>I'm part of three different organizations and never found a sensible way to share sets of papers with everyone easily.<p>I hate latex: positioning and sizing figures is hard, my formulas always come out ugly, I never know whether my ten thousands curly-braces are closed correctly before I compile.<p>I hate live online discussions of mathematical formulas, everyone has their preferred white boards full of ads that always bug, and I have to screenshot the screen to save what we talk about which is inconvenient, also I suck at writing math with a mouse. I hate writing live latex also because it's slow.<p>I like a lot of what overleaf has to offer for writing notes and asynchronous writing as a team.<p>That's all that I can think of off the top of my head with regards to the writing process. For context I only just finished a PhD (on a somewhat biomedical subject), maybe a lot of those pain points resolve themselves with more experience and different institutional practices, either way hope some of it is useful. Best of luck with your project.