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Review: Utopia Documents makes PDF articles easy to explore, not so much to read |
March 20, 2013
Scientific research is no walk in the park, but anyone who's ever worked in it will agree that finding, reading, and citing articles is one of the most time-consuming tasks. Utopia Documents is a free research utility aimed at making this task easier by offering a PDF reader with built-in exploration tools and other research aids. Although it can be considered as a direct competitor to services like Mendeley, Zotero and ReadCube, Utopia Documents is actually different from all three, and even sports a Mendeley integration.
Utopia Documents loads additional article information in the sidebar.
On the surface, Utopia Documents 2.2.1 looks like a PDF reader, and while you can certainly use it as your main reader, that's not its best point. It lacks simple features such as annotations, highlights, and so forth. Its strength lies in the sidebar, where you'll find extra information about every article you load, helping you research a subject, find related articles, create citations, and more. Start by loading a PDF from your computer, or pasting a PDF URL. Utopia Documents works only with PDFs.
Several seconds after loading an article, information will begin to fill the sidebar. This will change from article to article, but can include the article's metadata, a formatted citation in one of seven available formats (the BibTeX one kept returning "Internal Server Error" when I tried it), an Altmetric rating, telling you how much online discussion this article is attracting, related articles from Mendeley, the article's open access status, and if the article itself is open access, the full reference list, complete with links.
On the bottom left corner you'll find most of the document controls. From here you can toggle the pager for quick browsing through the article; the sidebar; and the figure browser, whichlets you flip through all the article's figures. The figure browser is a brilliant feature—sometimes the figures are all you want to see—but it doesn't always catch all of them in every article, so don't trust it blindly.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2031304/review-utopia-documents-makes-pdf-articles-easy-to-explore-not-so-much-to-read.html#tk.rss_reviews
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