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Back to School: Papers updated for the new term

by Giles Turnbull Aug 26th 2008 at 10:00PM

Papers iconTUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for a timely app update useful for students.

PDF management app Papers has been bumped to version 1.8.5, bringing what the developers claim are 100 improvements. Top on the list is a new sharing feature called Papers Archives, which lets you share a PDF file and its associated metadata with a colleague.

Papers isn't for everyone. Instead, it's specifically designed for students and academics, particularly those who deal with a lot of scientific periodicals in the course of their research. It lets you search them, sort them (manually or using Smart Folders), find them on any one of 14 different online repositories, rate them, browse your library in tabs, and much more.

Papers costs $42 for a single-user license, but students qualify for a 40 per cent discount.



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TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in...
 

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Uncle Flatline

When I was a Windows user, I think I've been looking for ages for a software like this.
I'm not kidding when I'm saying that in my case Papers was one of the killer applications (just like Osirix) in convincing me to switch. Really a great piece of software. As another user pointed out, a more powerful bibliography function could make it even better.
Btw, in my case it didn't cause any issue with .pdf files and their location...

August 27 2008 at 4:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
macxprt

I tried Papers several months ago. What the software does not tell you until you install it and set it up, is that it scours your hard drive for ALL pdf's and MOVES them into a central depository. I removed Papers from my system since it did not meet my needs, and found that all my PDF files were now moved to this depository. There was no log file indicating the original location so to this day, i have not had the time to hand move all the files to their original location. Serious bummer that you should be aware of before using Papers.

August 27 2008 at 1:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to macxprt's comment
mekentosj

@macxprt: As the developer of this product I can assure you that this is absolutely not true. Papers does nothing unless you explicitly tell it to import all your PDF files, it certainly doesn't scours your hard disk for all your PDF files. In addition the default setting is to make a copy of any imported PDFs and unless you again explicitly tell Papers to do so it won't move or delete any files.

August 27 2008 at 4:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tdowling

This is one of the most useful pieces of software that I've ever purchased. Brilliant application and very conscientious developers. The best feature in my eyes is being able to directly coordinate it with my university's library proxy server. I was expecting a kind of "iTunes for PDFs" when I tried Papers out, but it's definitely a couple levels beyond that.

August 27 2008 at 1:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ian George

iTune for academic articles is the way I explain it to everyone. one of my most used programs

August 27 2008 at 12:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
NutraAmy

Wrote my thesis (political science) using this software. I highly recommend it!

August 26 2008 at 11:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sportsmedjosh

I would like it to work effortlessly with EndNote allowing it to use the Papers database or import it. EndNote is much more powerful allowing other things such as graphs and figures to be cited as well. EndNote is a great way for me to keep organized. I spend an average of 15 - 16 hours per day in my lab and when it comes time to pull up articles I want to be able to spend the least amount of time possible. Papers, EndNote and Skim are great applications.

August 26 2008 at 11:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mark

I love this app !!! As a neuroscientist mac user, it's like iTunes for all my papers. Now if they could just add the ability to annotate pdfs and the ability to use it as a reference manager (like Endnote or Refworks)...

August 26 2008 at 10:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to mark's comment
NutraAmy

You can export your refs but yeah I would have loved to completely bypass other write-n-cite software. I couldn't stomach Endnote so I used Sente. I must say, I hate Sente but it's better than the alternatives.

August 26 2008 at 11:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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