It is wonderful to see teams working together, especially to empower their users to become more productive researchers and thinkers. RemNote became a sponsor of Connected Paper, a free website I have frequented for many months. That cross between the two and the supportive nature of this sponsorship truly made my day. While it may sound cliche, this act of support demonstrates a company’s commitment to research, knowledge sharing, and user empowerment. It is this culture of collaboration and support that is lacking in many other platforms. I am so glad that I made the right switch to RemNote a year ago!
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Absolutely, I do agree.
Edit: But I would also stay with what I have written here: PDF Metadata retrieval - #28 by Chinchivi
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I agree 30% of what you stated. Tools have different edges when catering to people’s needs. However it eventually comes down to personal choice of what you perceive as important and necessary. I am personally near the end of my thesis writing, no use of any citation management software but the combination of RemNote (outline) and word doc (final product). One of my profs is still writing manually and organize all of her reference through paper index. Despite that, she is one of the most prolific writers in her field. I don’t necessarily think that RemNote needs to be like other reference (or lit review) management, nor does it need to be in order to claim itself as a thesis tool. In the end, it really depends on the level of human and non-human interaction you expect to have when writing your thesis (I.e, how much computerized programs should be involved and to what extent).
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Thanks for your response. Also, it’s cool to learn how and for what people working on their thesis are using RemNote for it.
I agree: what tool you use comes down to personal choice. Also, RemNote doesn’t need to, nor should, claim that it is a tool for writing your thesis (nor be like other literature management software).
However, my critique was that in the twitter-post I was referring to, an idea was suggested that simply isn’t adhered to - namely, that you can replace specific tools with RemNote. Furthermore, I think that this, at least implicitly, suggested the idea that one can ‘go the whole way’ altogether in RemNote - collecting papers, managing literature, taking notes, working with them, finally writing your thesis. Because, if you were to replace all the other tools with RemNote, indeed, you would be writing your thesis in RemNote.
(The other possible understanding of that post would be that RemNote is really well integrated with these tools and that it is easy to switch from one to the other for your specific use case. But I consider this understanding unlikely.)
However, you’re right - what I haven’t stated clear enough is that even if this statement is untrue (at this time of development), the particular idea it suggested actually resonated with me.
What I did then was to formulate some of my thoughts for RemNote becoming such a tool - again: if we were to take that idea of ‘going the whole way’.
So, for me, it would be very interesting to hear with which 30% of what I wrote you agree?
Btw: Yes, the question of how much computerised programs should be involved and to what extent is indeed an intriguing one!
Ah, I hope I make more sense now 
I’ve also edited the original post… it should be formulated clearer now.
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Do keep in mind that marketing communication is not to be taken literally. The team are working towards building the app into a universal solution for as many knowledge-related tasks as possible (as their blog posts and “Life Learner” nomenclature would imply), but I’m sure they realise it’s a bit early to earnestly claim that that work is finished (as your excellent post on the feedback forums outlines).
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couldn’t have framed it better! Thanks @UMNiK
@Chinchivi your post was excellent, and your critique was on-point. We bit our teeth while sending out that tweet, knowing that our claims might be a bit of an exaggeration. To be honest, we are in-fact just experimenting with a few different tones for Marketing and seeing how the response is. That aside, your long post convinced me to dive deeper into Researcher based workflows and needs. I am currently doing a bit of digging myself for a good proposal that could allow us to actually go the whole way. Unsure if we could ever live up to the specializations offered by the niche-specific tools, but we are aiming to build for the 80% use cases in the 80-20 Pareto principle, thus empowering users to have most of the workflow withing RemNote and move out only when absolutely necessary. We would also like this to be true for all the major use cases (not just Researchers). A very ambitious claim/vision, but one that’s keeping us awake at night! We are indeed just getting started and are very excited about what’s coming in the next few months!
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Thank you both, @Karthikk and @UMNiK for your answers.
Yah, definetly, I didn’t want to rant about RemNote and their way of using Twitter… the fact that my contribution has triggered some thoughts on how RemNote can further support knowledge-based work is definitely an encouraging sign. Even though the software in its current state sometimes drives me to despair and gives me sleepless nights out of totally different reasons (e.g. when the search stops working, haha) - when RemNote does work, it is simply brilliant. It is so far the only tool I have used that allows me to (almost) have a workflow that is really fitting me. There is definitly some great work done and your effort is felt.
It is also good to hear that this will be the case - because yes, as @JRY rightly pointed out: different users have different needs. And probably nowhere is this more true than in a tool as flexible as RemNote. Even though I (personally!) appreciate that RemNote goes the way of offering more solutions for different academic needs, I find it highly commendable that this should be the case for everyone - not only researchers.
Thumps up 
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Let us break down your critique into fragments of smaller arguments:
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Your interpretation of “going the whole way.”
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What the marketing team should or should not claim, and
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what functions we should pursue in greater depth.
Then, let us delve deeper into each fragment.
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I tend to give the benefit of the doubt and assume the best intention when engaging in intellectual exchange. The way you interpret “going the whole way” in this instance, on the other hand, seems to be much more exhausting than what the audience and the team understand it to be. As an example, I did not find anything in RemNote’s recent tweet suggesting we could replace Microsoft Doc or (other platforms to produce the final products) with RemNote, but rather, as a research tool combining reference, note-taking, and PDF annotation. The roadmap provided is not an exhausted list (i.e., the advertisement leaves room for combining other platforms, such as MD or Latex editing). Therefore, your definition of “going the whole way” as an exhausting argument seems to be an unfair over-generalization and accusation.
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In the event that the marketing team states that “RemNote is superior to all of the software listed above in their separate specialty,” it would be a grossly incorrect claim. They appear, however, to place more emphasis on the integration of certain functions than on superiority for all. This allows customers to choose either a fully supported specialty or an integration at the expense of some lost features. As a selling point, integration is entirely ethical and logical, unless RemNote claims itself to be superior to all other programs in each of their functional areas and separate specialties.
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As I mentioned above, it is a personal choice to pick a tool and to work with it. If you require specific functionality provided by other platforms, you should choose the one (or combination of many) that is most appropriate for you. Functionalities are sometimes overvalued. It is always possible to improve applications with more specialized features, but this may increase learning curves and intimidate some users, particularly the novices. I don’t think RemNote should strive to “go the whole way” too much further in literature management and lose its focus on knowledge sharing and collaboration that might be more promising. The best approach to strike the right balance is to put all options on the table, so that users can choose between specialized features on other platforms and basic integration with RemNote. Again, like I stated above, if some features on other platforms are essential to some users, we all have choice to abandon RemNote and go for other software. Human agency is a legit thing.
I hope this fragmented approach addresses the issue here.
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Am I missing something or is this “Connected Papers integration” nothing more than a button you press to save open access PDFs into a RemNote page, with the title filled in as a treat? I see no other metadata ingestion whatsoever.
The tweet says https://twitter.com/rem_note/status/1494928183590010880?s=20&t=emaIjIRXO8jqI_AGm6PIGg “Let RemNote do all the Metadata collection automatically for you!”. Huh?
? Huh? do you want to ask members of the team with these specific questions rather than me, considering I am not paid to address questions Lmao?
Hey! The automatic metadata collection happens when PDFs are uploaded. But we are looking to expand our automatic detection capabilities here. It would be really helpful if you could share a list of all metadata that might be useful to collect for:
- Web-links
- PDFs
- Research papers
Thanks in advance!
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Hey, thanks for responding. I’ll speak to research papers (de facto all PDFs).
Why not just include the metadata from Connected Papers (at least)? It seems to have title, authors, publication, abstract. There’s your 80/20 already.
More ambitiously, for the rest, use Zotero metadata grabbing as a benchmark. It does quite well for most PDFs. (Runs automatically when adding PDFs, by default)
https://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata
The Retrieve Metadata feature uses a Zotero web service to find item metadata. The Zotero client sends the first few pages of text from the PDF to the web service, which uses a variety of extraction algorithms and known metadata from Crossref, paired with DOI and ISBN lookups, to build a parent item for the PDF. The Zotero lookup service doesn’t require a Zotero account and doesn’t log any data about the content or results of searches.
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Exactly what I was looking for thank you for this!
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