Nick’s Blog

I’ve been using Papers, a slick PDF manager, for about 3 months. Papers is like iTunes, but for PDFs. Alas, for those readers still using PC’s Papers is only available for Macs. Additionally it’s primarily designed for biologists; it only has built in PubMed access. If you meet these requirements, it’s a great tool. Additionally, the authors intend to add more journal search services in the future.

To use Papers you first import your PDFs. This is just a simple matter of drag-n-drop. Then you can go search each paper on PubMed and Papers will import the pertinent metadata (e.g. title, authors, abstract, etc) into its database. Of course you can also use PubMed to search for new articles. In this case, integration is seamless with Papers linking to the PDF and allowing you to download it and the metadata with one click.

Once Papers “knows” about a particular journal you can link straight to it and Papers will provide a list of the 50 most recent articles. Likewise papers provides an authors section with extra fields were you can add their contact information. At the moment this is not integrated with “Address Book,” but again the authors indicate this functionality is in the works. Like the journal search, Papers will also automatically search PubMed for a list of a particular author’s publications.

I do, however, have a few caveats. Papers seems to have issues with very large PDFs (e.g. greater that 50 megabytes) which when opened cause the program to crash. Occasionally, I have problems with the integrated search not finding papers I know I have in my database. A quick restart of the app seems to fix this. Perhaps most importantly, Papers doesn’t yet function as a bibliography/works cited organizer in the manner of EndNote or Sente.

Nevertheless, Papers has proven exceptionally useful while writing my MS thesis. It can now search within PDFs for particular words or phrases. This is helpful when you can not remember where you read about a particular concept. It also allows for reading in PDFs in fullscreen and has note taking functionality. This certainly saves on real paper and reduces clutter on my desk.

Papers is $39 from mekentosj.com and students can get a 40% discount.