Papers and iPapers in Nature
By cparnot at Sat, May 3 2008 5:23pm |
This nature news article explore the current software offerings for managing PDF downloads for scientists. Interestingly, the article focuses mostly on the Mac OS X program Papers, and then on another Max OS X offering, iPapers. It seems the Mac is leading the way on this one :-)
Comments
Papers or Sente
Sorry. But I don't get why everybody thinks Papers is so great.
It may be nice for organizing pdfs but I can't create a bibliography with it.
I use Sente to create bibliographies and it also allows me to sort my pdfs. So why do I need Papers then?
Reference Management Software
I guess the bottom line is it is good to have a choice, and that people have different needs. For me creating a bibliography comes very low on my list of needs. I spend most of the time searching so my top priorities are good indexing and collating, together with the ability to generate complex searches. With Leopard I find I'm becoming addicted to coverflow and quicklook, it is rapidly moving up my list of "must have" features.
More and more of the "Reference material" is now published in non-traditional media (blog, wiki...) and it will be interesting to see how the programs evolve to handle the new sources of information.
New software for new needs
To answer the first comment: I think the Nature article was focusing on the "pdf management" side of things, more than bibliography for manuscript writing. Of course, both tasks are related, but they are still different enough that both activities can be handled by 2 different programs. Not ideal, but it works fine for many.
I think what is interesting is that the way you manage articles nowadays is very very different from 10 years ago, when pdf downloads were very new, but actual real librairies were still very much necessary. Nowadays, it has become common for students, postdocs and professors to accumulate dozens or hundreds of pdfs on their hard drive, and the trips to the library have become very very rare. It would have been natural for bibliograpy software e.g. Endnote to follow the wave and adapt, but the truth is that PubMed integration and pdf management in Endnote is appaling (I don't know about Sente). So this has left space for the likes of Papers, iPapers, QEMU,...
One of the things that seem to make Papers successful is that is was designed to make PubMed search + web + pdf management tightly integrated, and all the user interface is built around that goal. So it is more than a list of features with checkboxes like you see on software packages. There is something about the integration, the ease-of-use, the design that made Papers successful. And yet, there is still a lot of room for improvement. In particular, the dream app would be to combine database search, pdf management and bibliography into one single program... Easier said than done!
Sente
I'm another Sente user. I gave up on Endnote a few years ago, after many years of hailing the program as one of the reasons why computers were invented. Endnote became far to buggy and the company unresponsive (unless you call admitting to the bug and telling you to wait for the next version to upgrade -$$$– and see if the bug disappears a response). Rant over.
Sente is being actively updated and improved. they have their share of issues, but they respond to them very well. Just in the last week or so they added the function to their latest update to allow you to drop a PDF file in your library and the program will try to match it with the correct reference in your library or seek it out from PubMed or Google scholar. It doesn't work 100% of the time, but most often it does and is very cool. There is a free trial version of the software so if your interested I'd check it out. (No I don't work for them).