How to read two-column academic papers on a phone

You open a paper on your phone and it's a postage stamp of tiny text in two columns. Zoom in, scroll down, scroll back up to the top of the second column, lose your place. There's a better way, and it starts before you zoom in.

Why two columns break on a phone

Academic papers are laid out for printed pages. Two narrow columns, small type, figures squeezed between them. On a phone you have three bad choices: read the whole page at a size you can't actually read, zoom into one column and scroll in a zigzag, or give up and save it for a laptop you'll never open.

The zigzag is the real killer. Every time you jump from the bottom of the left column to the top of the right one, you lose a line or two and your concentration with it. Reading becomes a navigation task.

Fix 1: Reflow the page into one column

Some PDF readers can extract the text of a page and show it as one continuous column, sized for your screen. The words wrap to your phone's width, so you just scroll down. No zooming, no zigzag.

What to look for in a reader that does this:

• You can switch between the reflowed text and the original page at any time, because figures, tables and equations often need the original layout.
• Highlights and notes still work in the reflowed view, so you don't have to choose between reading comfortably and marking things up.
• You can adjust line spacing and text size, since long sessions on a small screen get tiring fast.

In ClearRead's PDF reader this is called text flow view. It reflows the page into one readable column, and highlighting, drawing and notes all work there too.

Fix 2: Read in the right order

A paper isn't a novel. Reading it top to bottom is often the slowest way to understand it. Many researchers use some version of a multi-pass approach, the best known being S. Keshav's three-pass method. A phone-friendly version:

1. First pass, 5 to 10 minutes. Title, abstract, section headings, every figure and its caption, the conclusion. Skip everything else.
2. Write two sentences. What question does the paper ask, and what does it claim to have found? If you can't write them, do the first pass again.
3. Second pass. Read the introduction and results properly. Highlight the main claims and note anything you don't follow.
4. Third pass, only if you need it. The methods in detail. Most of the time, for coursework or general reading, you won't.

The first pass is perfect for a phone: short, light on detail, doable on a bus. Leave the methods for a bigger screen if you need them at all.

A worked example

Say you need to read a paper on sleep and memory for a seminar. On the first pass you read the abstract, look at the three figures and read the last two paragraphs. Your two sentences:

The paper asks whether sleeping after learning a word list helps people remember it better than staying awake. It reports that the group who slept recalled more words the next day than the group who stayed awake.

On the second pass, in text flow view, you highlight the main result in one color and put a question mark note next to a sentence about how recall was measured. That note is now your one question for the seminar. You never needed the methods section in detail.

Total time on the phone: about 25 minutes, spread across two short sessions.

Fix 3: Make small screens less tiring

• Use a dark or sepia page at night. A bright white page in a dark room is hard on the eyes. A good night mode darkens the page without turning photos and charts into strange negative images.
• Go full screen. A toolbar that hides itself while you read gives you back a surprising amount of space.
• Search instead of scrolling. Looking for where the authors define a term? Full-text search inside the document is faster than paging through twelve pages with your thumb.

Fix 4: Get your notes out of the PDF

Notes made on a phone have a habit of staying on the phone. When you finish a paper, export your highlights and notes somewhere you'll see them again. A plain Markdown file per paper works well: the two-sentence summary at the top, then your highlights and questions. ClearRead exports highlights, drawings and notes from a PDF as Markdown, which is easy to paste into any notes app.

A week later, read only your two sentences and try to explain the main result from memory. If you can, you've actually read the paper. If you can't, you know exactly which page to go back to.

Start with your next paper

Next time a PDF arrives in two columns, don't zoom. Reflow it, do the five-minute first pass and write your two sentences. You'll be surprised how much of a paper you can get through on a phone once you stop fighting the layout.