Get me the d@mn PDF: how I turned write-up procrastination into a new way to access research papers
Today's post is written by Ben Kaube. Ben is a PhD student researching in computational materials science at Imperial College London. When not running physics simulations, Ben likes to build software tools that remove frustrations from people’s lives. In the past Ben has helped researchers evidence the wider impact of their work and provided commuters with a means to hold rail companies to account for delays. Does this sound familiar? You're reading a new journal paper and come across a result you've not seen before referenced from a paper you can't remember reading. You copy and paste the reference into Google, click on the first link and hit a paywall, or only get a reference but not the actual published PDF. Mildly annoyed you tap at the back button in your browser and scan other results on the page -- nothing. In desperation you click through to page two, then page three. You know that the chances of finding the paper on page four are near zero. Occasionally you ven...