Show HN: I built Goodreads for academic papers to help my wife survive her PhD

[lowercasename]

My wife recently started her PhD and while she uses Zotero as a citation manager, she was really missing a tool for keeping track of what she's reading right now/has already read/needs to read next. This overwhelming experience might be familiar to other researchers working on a niche field where every paper is called pretty much the same thing

So I built her Paperstack. It's basically Goodreads, but for research papers:

- Save articles to familiar To Read/Reading/Read stacks - Tag articles with logical projects/chapters/whatever your system is - Get AI-generated summaries so you can quickly decide if a paper is worth your time

I would love feedback from any students and researchers managing paper overwhelm!

[jwardbond]

Serendipitous, as I was just planning a lit review on a topic I am unfamiliar with, and was frustrated by my increasingly messy list of "to read".

Quick thoughts:

- I would like a "not read" stack, for papers that I peeked at but decided against reading.

- The registration link took a few minutes to come in, I thought something was broken.

- I keep trying to click the stack titles to take me into the stacks, but they aren't clickable.

- I couldn't figure out how to use a summary credits

- I couldn't figure out how to search/export my notes and tags

- I would like a way to quickly see my own 1-line summaries of the papers I have read. Maybe under the titles/authors.

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Long Thoughts:

What does this do that a "to-read" folder on Zotero doesn't? This post made me ask myself why I don't just use the to-read folder I already set up in Zotero.

1) Adding something to zotero is a bit of a process, and feels like I have to be 100% committed to reading it, and thus I hesitate to put the "I'll check it out later" papers into my to-read folder on zotero. Your website is much more focused and low-effort to use.

2) I often forget why I wanted to read something in the first place. I like to store items on my to-read list according to the parent paper I discovered them in, to remember what I was doing when I added them to the list. Zotero notes/relations are not the easiest way to do this, so I stick to a markdown list.

3) My to-read list is so long, with so many papers from 2 years ago that I didn't end up needing, that I don't know where to start when I look at it. It would be nice to have a way to rank papers on my list by priority, or group them by topic tags, etc.

[jwardbond]

Realized I forgot about the golden rule of feedback: start with something positive! I will end with it instead.

I thought the UI was slick. You have identified a very real problem I am having as a PhD student, and this solution genuinely feels like something I would use. Cool stuff.

[lowercasename]

This feedback has been really great and detailed, just what I was looking for!

- I've added an option in user settings to turn on a 'Skipped' stack.

- Card titles should now all be clickable!

- It's now more obvious that you need to upload a PDF before you can use the AI summary (because the LLM has to read the PDF).

- I've made a dedicated page to see all your tags just like you already have with stacks. You can't reorder them yet but hopefully I will add that soon.

- Export and search are coming soon!

- I'm thinking about your other suggestions, thank you!

[eduardogarza]

Always have some type of demo without requiring a login/signup. You lose out on so many people like me that just immediately close as soon as I find out that I can't see what it is without signing up.

[lowercasename]

That's a very good point. I've just put up some screenshots on the landing page - it's not a demo to be fair, but at least you can see what using it might look like!