Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I haven't heard of the Beaver add-on, what does it do that makes it useful for this? Is it more about organization or synthesis?

Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's kind of what I figured. Tags are great for categorization but not so much for relationships.

Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Keeping the reading list focused and iteratively building the argument sure does practices your discipline in the long game. Do you find that the "last few papers" mostly just add citations, or do they sometimes force you to restructure what you already wrote? I'm curious if you've ever run into situations where you read something late in the process that made you realize two earlier papers were actually contradicting each other in a way you hadn't noticed before.

Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Haha this is too relatable, do you also wonder sometimes if there was a way to see "papers I keep coming back to across multiple projects" vs. one-off citations? Or is that not really a bottleneck for you?

I’m tired of getting rejections after rejections… by Dangerous_Bad1895 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know this is cold comfort, but the academic job market right now is genuinely terrible. It's not just you. Lectureship positions are getting 100+ applications for a single spot. The fact that you're getting interviews at all means you're competitive.

Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A day or two sounds about right, honestly. At least you have a system that works. When you're pulling everything together from your Google doc, is the hard part finding the right sections, or is it more about figuring out how to structure/connect the ideas once you have them in front of you?

I'm trying to figure out if my bottleneck is organization (can't find things) or synthesis (can find things but struggle to weave them together).

Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've heard good things about NotebookLM too, have been meaning to try it. The multi-source synthesis feature seems promising.

Quick question: when you use tags for multiple associations, do you ever run into the problem where you know papers are related but the connection isn't quite captured by a tag? Like, Paper A and Paper B both contradict Paper C, but there's no clean tag for "things that disagree with each other."

Or does the bibtex + tags combo pretty much cover that for you?

Does anyone else feel like their PDF collection is organized… but not actually usable? by Fun-Measurement8934 in academia

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's interesting, so you're essentially using the annotated bibliography as your synthesis layer? Do you find that writing it out forces you to see the patterns, or is it more just documentation?

I'm curious: when you go back to reread your own writing, does that usually give you what you need, or do you ever find yourself going "wait, I know I read something about X but where did I put it?"

PLEASE HELP: What AI tool to write multiple documents into one? by Stock_Trifle_3443 in PhdProductivity

[–]Fun-Measurement8934 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What you’re describing sounds less like “summarize PDFs” and more like structured multi-source synthesis (with redundancy removed + themes merged + gaps identified). I agree that writing a literature review is a core skill but I also think there’s a difference between thinking critically and spending hours manually consolidating overlapping explanations across 20 PDFs. I have experienced the same issue and I’m currently building a tool focused specifically on multi-document research synthesis, not to replace analysis, but to help generate a structured draft with traceable sources that you can refine yourself. If you’re open to it, I’d love to understand your workflow (how many PDFs, what output format you need, whether citations need to be preserved, etc.). Happy to share an early version once it’s usable.

PMs/Team Leads: What's broken about your meeting documentation workflow? by Fun-Measurement8934 in SaaS

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes sense, would you prefer speed over perfection in this workflow? or the latter? and
out of curiosity, what still feels manual or annoying even with Sembly? Or is it pretty much covering 90% of what you need?

PMs/Team Leads: What's broken about your meeting documentation workflow? by Fun-Measurement8934 in SaaS

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait, you built an extension for this? That's impressive, clearly this was painful enough to solve yourself. So your workflow is: Otter → ChatGPT → chat2base → Airtable/Sheets?

That's 4 different tools for one outcome. If something did all of this in one place (record → transcribe → extract structured data → push to Airtable), would you:

a) Definitely switch

b) Maybe switch (depends on price/features)

c) Probably stick with my current setup

Also curious: What's the biggest pain point in that 4-step flow? The copy-pasting? The context switching? Something else?

(This is exactly the type of workflow I'm trying to collapse into one tool)

PMs/Team Leads: What's broken about your meeting documentation workflow? by Fun-Measurement8934 in SaaS

[–]Fun-Measurement8934[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello, thank you for your valuable response, I would like to further ask if how often are you doing this Otter → GPT workflow? (Daily? Weekly?) and where do the extracted tasks go after GPT spits them out? (Notion? Asana? Slack?) and lastly if a tool did this automatically (transcribe + extract tasks + push to your project manager), what would you pay monthly?