Developer Builds Lightweight Research Paper Tracker to Fix Retrieval Problem

A product professional who reads around 30 research papers monthly grew frustrated after spending 45 minutes hunting down a single paper he had read months earlier. Existing tools like Zotero and Notion either felt too complex or stored papers without making them easy to retrieve. He turned to Paper List, a tool he describes as a personal paper engine built around fast capture, lightweight annotation, tagging, and keyword search. His workflow — saving, reading, annotating, and tagging each paper — takes under two minutes, and he has catalogued roughly 90 papers since adopting it. While the tool lacks collaboration features and a browser extension, he considers its simplicity a worthwhile trade-off over more feature-heavy academic reference managers.