During the course of my Masters and PhD work I accumulated a veritable mountain of papers… articles ordered from library research services, photocopied papers tossed on my desk by my advisor, and the occasional seminal paper that I stumbled across in an old journal that I knew that I’d never be able to find again. A similar electronic mess was accumulated in the form of several archive folders of .PS.Z and .pdf files. The mountain of physical papers currently resides in a couple of filing boxes stored back in Australia but I can finally do something with the backups of the electronic papers that I’ve been religiously copying from one system to another since I finished my studies.
Papers screenshot
Papers is an OS X application for managing archives of research papers. I toyed with Papers during the public preview and though the application had numerous bugs I was impressed with it enough to order a license before v1.0. As it turns out, my faith was well placed. Papers v1.0 resolved many of the obvious problems in the preview versions and the developers have quickly released a couple of updates to resolve some glaring bugs in subsequent versions.
Papers is currently at v1.0.2. The current version still has a few rough edges such as some odd quirks when updating Paper entries, off-by-one update issues when redisplaying the list of documents in the database after a delete, and phantom authors that persist in the authors list until the user triggers a clean-up of the database. But overall, this is a handy application for getting the typical mess of .pdf files under control.
In the same way that iTunes absolves the user from having to manage the storage of music files, Papers absolves the user from having to manage storage of your research papers. Documents stored in papers can be browsed by paper, author, or journal and the browse list can be constrained by a one-off keyword search. If that isn’t sufficient, then the user can build up Smart Collections of documents as required.
The current version of Papers is slanted to best manage papers from the area of biology and genetics. For example, the only online paper repository that Papers hooks into is PubMed, and there is currently no support for capturing author affiliations where a paper has multiple authors from different organizations. The developers of Papers have told me via email that they are aware of the slant toward the biomed space (due to the developer’s own background), but they hope to expand Papers to provide better coverage of metadata for other research fields. The developers also have defined an API that will eventually be made public to allow users to develop hooks into other online paper repositories.
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