From The Tips Box: Article Summaries, Web Notes

Readers offer their best tips for browsing journal articles quickly and taking web-based notes.

Every day we receive stacks of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using our [contact text=”contact form”].

Browse Journal Articles with One-Sentence Summaries

Jaan shares a clever site that lets you quickly browse one-sentence summaries of journal articles:

We just launched usefulscience.org — one sentence summaries of journal articles applicable to everyday life. We are a team of grad students (MIT, McGill, UCSB, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins) that have to dive into all kinds of journal articles regularly. We made one-sentence summaries because we thought we’d like to use them, but we’re hoping they’ll be helpful to others, too!

Take Quick Web-Based Notes with Scrtchpd.com

Dave shares a web app that makes quick note-taking super simple:

I just wanted to let you know about a quick tool I made to help with my everyday workflow. It’s called scrtchpd.com and it’s a super simple note-taking tool that lives in your browser. Scrtchpd.com saves your notes for you, so you don’t need to worry about it. It also supports live markdown previews to help bring some organisation and formatting to your notes.

There’s not much else to it. It exists simply to allow you to take notes and make those notes look nice. Otherwise the app is designed to get out of the way of the user. I made it because I wanted to use it, so hopefully other folks find it useful too!