Google Scholar PDF Reader

Already 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.

Capturing 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&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.knowledgegarden.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.knowledgegarden.io&#x2F;</a>

Does anyone have a research paper reading tool they&#x27;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.

Most important papers can be read with highlighting at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semanticscholar.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semanticscholar.org&#x2F;</a> (PDF Semantic Reader, skimming assist)

For me, reading papers requires deep focus. I have to have it physically printed out if I&#x27;m going to really read the whole thing.

This looks great! Since they link it all to one&#x27;s Gmail account, I wonder if they implement saving annotations to these PDFs and have them live on your Drive or elsewhere.<p>Edit: Also, Chrome now defaults to this extension for rendering any PDFs you load.

Looks great, but can you imagine Google pulling the rug under an academic&#x27;s document&#x2F;citation database?<p>I don&#x27;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.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good local PDF readers for Windows? I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to have a working back feature.

I&#x27;ve never seen so many light&#x2F;dark modes before. There&#x27;s Device Mode, Light Mode, Dark Mode, and Night Mode. AFAICT Device Mode follows the browser&#x2F;device&#x27;s current setting, Dark Mode makes the sidebar dark but doesn&#x27;t change the PDF, and Night Mode darkens both the sidebar and the PDF. I wonder how they decided to have so many modes?

That&#x27;s nice and all, but google scholar recently removed all the &#x27;cited by&#x27; &#x27;related articles&#x27; 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&#x27;s computer is like around the world. They dev for their lived experience and it&#x27;s just not applicable. A javascript (slow, computationally expensive) pdf reader is just another aspect of this ignorance.

I use a tool called Scholars<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scholars.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scholars.io</a><p>Let you import and read PDF directly, annotate, comment and share with people.

It 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 &quot;sunset&quot;ed it.

I use an extension called histre, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;histre.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;histre.com&#x2F;</a> for annotation and keeping up with _notes_ &#x2F; _thoughts_ inline. I found that using tools like Fermat&#x27;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, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;senthil.learntosolveit.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;medical-journal-paper-on-stroke.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;senthil.learntosolveit.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;medical-...</a> for me, in one instance.

Ha 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:<p>* Summarisation<p>* Succinctly placing the research in context of the broader field<p>* Highlighting limitations or flaws in research methods, etc.<p>* An outline view to summarise each paragraph&#x2F;section and then drill down into the ones you actually want to read in more detail<p>* Rephrasing into plain English. A lot of academics enjoy sounding clever and usling long words so it&#x27;d be nice to be able to switch off &quot;ego mode&quot; and just read stuff in plain English instead of having to wade through their word-soup.<p>With more effort maybe Google could create a PDF reader that is actually innovative.

Can 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 &quot;Save to pocket&quot; extension.

Does 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?

&gt; You can focus on absorbing the scholarship – the format is simple and clean.<p>Unless you need to scroll left and right on your phone instead of absorbing

Can 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.<p>Maybe this just needs a script? I just paid $100 for EndNote 21 yesterday and don’t think these needs justify that cost.

Has anyone tried installing this? It says &quot;PDFs on all sites will have a new look in Chrome.&quot;<p>This makes me nervous. I&#x27;m often looking at PDFs that are embedded in a page (either grad school software for commenting on PDFs, or publishers&#x27; sites). Is it going to play nicely with those? Is this only for navigating directly to a PDF?

So I guess this a way for Google to gather (more&#x2F;fine-grain) data on paper skimming&#x2F;research interest?

&gt; Scholar PDF Reader is available as a Chrome browser extension<p>So it&#x27;s a closed ecosystem for now ... pass.

Alt+&lt;- 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.

This will be in the Google Graveyard <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a> by mid-2026.

Zotero is the one I use but found this one useful too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;synthical.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;synthical.com&#x2F;</a>

Hmm, nice to have direct links to references. But the PDF rendering itself seems not as good as the native renderer.

&quot;..have long loved PDFs&quot; not.

When can we have a PDF reader where we can hover over a symbol and see its definition?

Now all they need is a way to grab documents from SciHub..

I just wish Google Scholar would be a bit more open in terms of debugging why a site isn&#x27;t picked up by the platform