Best use cases
Researchers often work with information that still exists on paper — books, archives, printed journals, reports, and reference documents. A scanning pen can make selective capture much faster for quotations, citations, reference material, archival research, printed books, library research, and field notes.
When a pen scanner makes sense
Pen scanning works particularly well when you need to capture selected lines rather than digitize an entire document. For full books or large document collections, dedicated document scanners or OCR software may be more appropriate.
Research workflow
Scan, then let OCR recognize the text, then edit it, then save it, then cite it.