PHD Helper vs PubMinder

PhD life is a lot: deadlines, reading lists, writing targets, supervisor meetings, and endless admin. PhD Helper is a completely free app designed to help you manage your research journey in one calm, organised place. Built by a PhD student for PhD students, PhD Helper helps you plan your timeline, capture what you’re reading, track your writing, and keep all the little tasks and notes from slipping through the cracks. Key features PhD Roadmap: Enter your start and target finish dates and get an auto-generated timeline. Customise it with tasks, track progress, see if you’re ahead/behind, and use a countdown to stay motivated. Share with your supervisor: Export your roadmap or share it through the app so your supervisor can view it. Reading Library: Add papers and documents, tag what’s useful, take notes, and keep your sources organised. Automatic Harvard referencing: Generate Harvard references automatically and export a reference list. Writing Tracker: Time your writing sessions, add time manually if you forgot, and view stats like your top writing days and streaks. To-Dos (PhD admin included): Capture university tasks and classify them so you always know what they relate to. Brain Dump: Save ideas, paper titles, supervisor notes and more. Add images/screenshots, and capture voice notes with transcription. Profile & data control: Stay in control of your data and delete your account when you’re done. Pricing Free. No subscription required. If you want a clearer plan, a cleaner reading workflow, and a simple way to track your writing — PhD Helper is here to help.

PubMinder is an AI-powered research feed for scientists, students, and curious minds. It aggregates the latest preprints and journal articles from bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and PubMed — then summarizes each one in 2–3 plain-English sentences using Apple Intelligence (on-device) or Groq's free AI. WHAT IT DOES Fetches the newest papers from the subjects you care about Summarizes every abstract automatically — no reading walls of text Opens papers in a built-in reader, so you never lose your place Lets you save and share papers with one tap Search your saved papers and sort by date, title, or source Supports keyword filtering so only relevant papers reach your feed ORGANIZE YOUR LIBRARY (PRO) Add tags and notes to any saved paper Group papers into collections and browse by project Export your library to BibTeX, RIS, or CSV — import straight into Zotero, EndNote, or Mendeley, with authors, year, and journal included SOURCES INCLUDED bioRxiv — biology and life sciences preprints medRxiv — medical and clinical preprints arXiv — physics, mathematics, and computer science preprints PubMed — peer-reviewed journal articles via NCBI E-utilities AI SUMMARIZATION On Apple Intelligence-capable devices (A17 Pro, A18, or M-series chips, iOS 26+), summaries run entirely on-device — no internet, no API key needed. On other devices, PubMinder uses Groq's free cloud AI. A free Groq API key takes about 2 minutes to set up at console.groq.com. PRO AI summaries and your saved library are free. A single one-time purchase (no subscription) unlocks tags, notes, collections, unlimited subjects, and library export. PRIVACY PubMinder does not collect personal data, require an account, or track you. API keys are stored in the iOS Keychain, not in plain text.