Papers: Scientific Papers PDF Manager

Great App!

Does anyone know of anything similar that handles legal databases (ie LexisNexis or Westlaw)?

Any thoughts would be MUCH appreciated.

Ross,

Read the FAQ in the developers' website. They are from the life sciences so they started with PubMed -- they will integrate the other major databases once they hit 1.0. If they'd done arXiv first, you'd have a bunch of biologists (myself included) complaining on this site that PubMed integration is a must. It's a Beta people, so treat it as such.

Finally, to the many proponents of Endnote and/or other bibliography managers as a replacement or addition to Papers -- note that Papers aims to complement and integrate with these tools -- not replace them. As it is, Papers is compatible with Endnote, RefMan and BibTeX.

Oh, and a Tablet Mac + "iNote" would be absolutely awesome and something we are all waiting for. I imagine Apple is hard at work with one that will mimic and expand on iPhone's multi-touch interface, and thus make PC tablets look dated and ill-conceived in comparison. =)

Juan.

I was looking at Yep for managing my PDF files, and while it looked promising it has a much smaller feature set than I'd like. I looked at Papers a couple of days ago and not only does it do much, it promises to do much more. The one advantage of Yep is strong scanner support. I haven't seen where Papers is looking at that, but I haven't spent a lot of time at their site yet.

Papers certainly looks very nice and uploading a pdf seems to be pretty easy. However, I wouldn't switch from using Endnote as I need a program that can insert references into a manuscript in one of numerous styles (stipulated by the journal). Endnote is compatible with Web of Knowledge, which is another major way of searching the scientific literature. I have my pdfs linked to the reference in Endnote, which is searchable, and this works fine. I currently use Endnote 9.0 on a Powerbook G4 and experience no problems with it.

I've been using Papers for about a month now, and I will highly recommend it for anyone in the medical science field. Endnote is a necessary evil because I need a reference manager (it would be great if Papers worked this into a future version).

A few points to add: you can do your Pubmed searches, link to the journal website and download the PDF all from within papers - think of it like the iTunes store for medical publications. You can match your existing PDFs to their Pubmed entries and add the metadata with the click of a button. You can read PDFs in fullscreen mode. And my favourite option is creating smart folders of PDFs, just like smart playlists in iTunes.

MekenTosj make some other great science-specific apps that I use all the time and highly recommend.

Uhhh... Isn't pubmed for medicine? Not that that's a bad thing, but that certainly doesn't include general science. If one were trying to develop such a manager they would, at a bare minimum, integrate with http://arxiv.org . Of course, Bibdesk (plus a couple of applescripts) will already do that for free.

I'd also like to have an application that combined Papers functionality with the ability to annotate PDFs in a smart way. Unfortunately, I think Apple's PDFKit implements annotations in such that after you save a PDF with a note or circle or whatever, you can't delete it. Try it out with Preview.

I still prefer BibDesk, which is free.

http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

I know this is going to sound heretical, but this exact issue is what drove me back to, dare I say it, Windows!

Let me explain. First off, I'm by no means a MS fanboy. If anything, I love my Mac and all things Apple. That's why I read this site. However, I'm currently working on a dissertation in French and was tired of printing all the different articles out. I wanted a solution that could be contained all in one place as well as all of my notes. An excellent Mac program, which you probably know is DevonThinkPro. It's great at keeping everything in order. Last year, I used it to write my first chapter, wiki style. Very nice.

But then I picked up a Tablet PC for pretty cheap on Craigslist, and discovered OneNote 2003 and then OneNote 2007. To make it short, now I can print pdfs to OneNote then use the pen to highlight, take handwritten or typed notes, and move back and forth quickly between notebooks. I also use it for organizing the classes I teach and for taking notes during conferences, etc. I've also scanned books to pdf so that I can highlight them and have them with me. All my pdfs, all my notes, all my projects, all in one place.

While I still use my Mac mini at home as a repository for all my media files, I get most of my work done on the Tablet. Until Apple comes out with something akin to the Tablet and OneNote, I'll have a hard time switching back exclusively to a Mac.

I'd like to recommend Bookends. I used to use EndNote, but it would crash my computer regularly. Bookends allows you to organize and store your references. It will also allow you to launch an associated pdf in in Acrobat, where you can highlight, comment, etc. to your heart's content. I agree that an app that can do bibliography management, reference database, and article annotation in a single environment would be excellent