Products · Broad category
Academic publishing
Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2011–2023), in 15 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with Academic publishing, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Legal publisher sites have crippled navigation and search, making documents slow to find and read2023-05-05
- Constant interruptions to look up complex words and undefined symbols2022-09-18
- Must create accounts and can only read in a webviewer, no download or annotation2022-02-21
- Papers often lack a definitive date, with many versions circulating, making dating them hard2022-01-26
- Papers omit code, audio samples and crucial details, so they are hard to reproduce or use2021-12-10
- Method descriptions skip crucial details, so papers can't be used to reproduce results2021-12-09
- Paper-form output is basically unusable for extracting knowledge from papers2021-12-09
- Authors can't get usable final copies and pages aren't numbered until a year later2021-05-08
- Papers are PDFs, so readers can't use annotations, search, or links like web pages2019-07-13
- Dense unexplained notation and convoluted definitions make a simple idea slow to parse2017-03-25
- Academic thematic resources are so hard to use that they are practically unusable2014-08-04
- Obscure vocabulary makes academic papers hard to understand2012-10-21
- Two-column text layout forces scrolling and context switching when read on screen2012-09-06
- Students hit unintuitive interfaces and broken links when trying to reach articles2011-08-30
- Must click through logins and menus, and retype footnote citations manually into library search2011-06-08