Generate a glossary from any document - every term cited.
Dense documents bury their jargon. Sidenote reads the whole thing and builds a glossary of the acronyms, terms and proper nouns, each defined in plain English and citing the exact passage it came from. Click any entry to scroll straight to where the term first appears.
Targeted protein degradation
Bifunctional PROTACs (proteolysis-targeting chimeras) recruit an E3 ligase to a target protein, tagging it for destruction. The approach builds on earlier work from Arvinas and academic collaborators.
Degradation runs through the ubiquitin–proteasome system (UPS), the cell's primary route for clearing tagged proteins. Unlike classic inhibitors, a single degrader molecule can act catalytically across many target copies.
The jargon is the part that slows you down.
Every field has its own shorthand. A research paper drops a dozen acronyms before page two; a runbook assumes you know the service names; an onboarding doc is half abbreviations. You can read the words and still not follow the argument, because the vocabulary was never explained.
A glossary fixes that, but building one by hand means re-reading the whole document and hunting for first mentions. Sidenote does that pass for you, and ties each definition back to the line it came from so you can check it in a click.
How Sidenote builds the glossary.
It reads the whole document.
On the Glossary tab you click Build, and Sidenote passes over the full text (not a sample), pulling out the acronyms, domain jargon and proper nouns that a reader would actually need defined.
It defines each term in plain English.
Definitions come from the document first, using its own first-mention expansions where they exist, and fall back to a short general-knowledge definition for widely-known terms the text leaves unexplained.
Every entry cites its source.
Each term is anchored to the passage it was found in. Click an entry and Sidenote scrolls the live document to where the term first appears and highlights it, so you verify the definition in context.
Acronyms, jargon and proper nouns.
Sidenote sorts each term by kind, so a glossary reads the way you'd expect: the abbreviation tells you its expansion, the entity tells you who or what it is. Common words and bare numbers are left out unless the document gives them a specific meaning.
Acronyms
The abbreviation plus its expansion: “GLP-1” becomes “Glucagon-like peptide-1”, pulled from the document's first mention.
Domain jargon
The field-specific vocabulary that carries the argument, defined in one sentence and grounded in how the document uses it.
Proper nouns
The people, products, places and named entities the document references, so you know who and what it's talking about.
One glossary across a whole Collection.
A single document's glossary is useful; a shared vocabulary across a project is better. Bundle your papers, wiki pages or specs into a collection and Sidenote merges a single, deduplicated glossary across all of them, each entry still naming the document it came from, so the citationtrail never breaks. It reuses any per-document glossary you've already built, so only the new documents do fresh work.
Merged and deduplicated
A term that appears in three papers shows once, not as three near-identical entries cluttering the list.
Each entry names its document
Every definition tells you which document it came from, so you can trace it back across the whole collection.
Reuses prior work
Per-document glossaries you've already built are reused from cache; only new members trigger a fresh build.
And when a glossary is worth passing on, send it as a share link: snapshot-frozen, revocable, and readable without a Sidenote account.
A glossary from every kind of document.
The same builder works wherever Sidenote reads: browser PDFs and articles, your wikis, your docs, and files you upload. Pick a source:
Common questions about the glossary builder.
Decode the jargon. In one click.
Add Sidenote to your browser, open a document, and hit Build on the Glossary tab. Watch it pull out every term, each one cited to the line it came from.
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