I built Goodreads for academic papers to help my wife survive her PhD
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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 thingSo 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 timeI would love feedback from any students and researchers managing paper overwhelm!
HN · launched Jan 26, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 90%) · 0 views
Niche: academic writing and research tools · 139 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- Search & retrieval
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 139 launches in academic writing and research tools →
Could you build this?
Yes A 'Goodreads for academic papers' is a standard full-stack web application featuring user authentication, CRUD bookshelves, search, and integrations with APIs like Semantic Scholar or arXiv.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Zotero with to-read folder functionality
Concerns raised: Requires PDF upload before AI summary works, Registration email took several minutes to arrive, Unclear how to use summary credits, Demo/screenshots require signup to fully explore, Comparison to existing Zotero workflow unclear
Feature requests: Priority ranking or sorting for papers, Video demo or GIF showing feature usage, Reorderable tags page, Export and search functionality, 'Not read' or 'Skipped' stack for rejected papers
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 312 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #305 of 313 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 82 days after the earliest competitor.
- academic-papers-guide · github · 2026-10-29 · 26 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- EasyRead · ph · 2026-10-04 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I built time to read all the things I want to · hn · 2025-12-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Biblitics: Academic Research · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- My PhD · ph · 2026-09-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Doomscrolling Research Papers · hn · 2025-12-02 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- openpaper · github · 2026-10-30 · 38 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Ponder · ph · 2026-11-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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