[OS X] Papers bibliographic software

[Andy Jacobson]

Howdy,

I've managed my bibliographic database with bibtex and EndNote, but  
I'm considering purchasing a copy of Papers (http://mekentosj.com/ 
papers/).  This is a $42 piece of software, for which you can install  
on two computers.  There's a 40% discount for students.  Papers has  
full interoperability with bibtex and EndNote (import and export),  
and great integration with Web of Science and other popular online  
citation databases.

There are some interface innovations I really like:

(1) Papers maintains not only full bibliographic information, but was  
built around the idea of having a library of PDFs.  Each reference  
can be linked to a corresponding PDF, and viewed right within Papers.

(2) You can drop PDFs onto Papers and it will import them  
immediately, and attempt to scan them for bibliographic information.   
It can usually detect DOIs and use online databases to fill in the  
citation information.

(3) I especially appreciate its iTunes-like interface, where subsets  
of papers can be associated with "collections".  This is potentially  
useful for cross-referencing papers by diverse topics, or by  
projects...I imagine a collection for each manuscript being worked on.


I had fiddled with Papers before, but could not figure out how to  
import my bibtex/EndNote database and associate each reference with  
the correct PDF file.  That would have meant laboriously importing  
each PDF and matching it to its database entry.  However, I recently  
found a hint on the Papers support forums that led to a solution.   
When importing a bibtex file, if there's a field "pdf = {/path/to/pdf/ 
file}", then Papers will import the PDF along with the bib entry.   
Worked like a charm, once I wrote a simple script to insert PDF file  
names in the bibtex file.

Papers will export to a "Word2008" bibliography, whatever that is,  
but doesn't offer the Cite-While-You-Write feature that EndNote is  
known for.  (My experience is that is a far too clunky feature to  
actually use anyway.)

I know there are other reference software solutions out there.   
Bookends has been mentioned to me, for example.  If anyone else cares  
to chime in on this topic, I'm sure others would be interested.

I can't yet convince Papers to use my preferred citekey/label syntax,  
but this only really applies to newly-imported papers (my old labels  
are preserved), and they're editable.  Perhaps in the future the  
citekey will become more customizable.

Best Regards,

Andy


--
Andy Jacobson
andy.jacobson at noaa.gov

NOAA Earth System Research Lab
Global Monitoring Division
325 Broadway
Boulder CO 80305

303/497-4916