If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate your feedback on an application I am writing, since you’ve done such an extensive survey of so many of the others. It’s available at http://www.qiqqa.com.

I have been coming at the research management problem from a different perspective. I decided to build Qiqqa (pronounced “Quicker”) at the same time as working towards my PhD.

Although I did try using existing applications like Zotero and Mendeley, to locate my papers, I found them all quite lacking in the ability to mark the interesting parts of my papers (text, formulae and diagrams) so that I can quickly review them every few months, and especially when it comes time to writing up my thesis! GoogleScholar is still my method of choice for locating documents, so I made it easy to query Google Scholar while reading a PDF. Of course, using it all day, I have added in tons of little nifty features that save me loads of time (e.g. right-click text in PDF and lookup word in dictionary.com).

Also, I found the text searching and exporting support from most of the other tools to be quite unreliable for scanned PDFs, so I built in OCR to tackle that.

At the moment I don’t support bibliography management – although that is coming fast (I have only been working on Qiqqa since the beginning of this year and I don’t want to add yet-another-half-baked-references-manager to the world). But first I am putting in the finishing touches on synchronizing and backing up onto the Amazon S3 cloud so that I can work from the lab and from home.

I am hoping that others will find Qiqqa useful, and will enjoy using it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I hope to get a lot of feedback from other students and researchers to learn how they are approaching their PhDs or research, and where they are hitting bottlenecks.

Thanks,
Jimme (jimme@qiqqa.com)