Product: Papers
Price: $42.00 (40% Student Discount)
Rating: Strong Recommend
As a recent graduate in a field that is very heavily research oriented, we constantly found ourselves drowning in a sea of articles. Not just one, two or three articles, but stacks of 50 that we meticulously printed and hauled around even if we only read or referenced them once. About two years ago, we discovered Papers by Mekentosj, and it revolutionized the way we approached consuming articles. Even better, it sped up the process of reading articles and building citations.
Working with peer reviewed articles is a pain. If you do any type of work ranging from academia to research oriented then a software program like Papers is a must have. Not only does it ease the transition to a paperless office, it also enables you to seamless search article repositories from within the app. What makes the app really shine is the simple ability to import the articles with all of the requisite reference information required. That makes it extremely easy to then export a bibliography into a number of formats for quick and easy citing in whatever program you choose to write a manuscript. It even has very sophisticated search functionality so anyone can find what they are looking for in a particular article.
What highlights Papers is not only the sophisticated nature of the software, but the ease of use. It also allows you to organizing articles into easy to find groups. That makes it a breeze to switch between articles for uses on different projects or based on particular subjects. Even with a repository approaching 1000 articles, the software keeps chugging along. Even more refreshing, it is extremely stable and does not crash which is quite important if you trust Papers with your thesis or dissertation.
Reading articles within Papers is also quite handy. It has a reading pane below a list of articles and has a handy full page reading view if you need to block everything else out. Even better, Papers can sync with its iOS counterparts which we will detail in another review shortly.
One off the book features we have used and love is that Papers can be synced between multiple computers by using Dropbox. That way we have our laptop and desktop both in sync so we always know that we have the latest and greatest in reading material no matter where our office happens to be.
Papers is not without flaws. First, it is Mac only locking out a large number of Windows users who could benefit from the software. Second, the article search really only works if you are on a university or business network that subscribes to repositories like JSTOR. We overcome this using VPN software, but that is a technical challenge not all users are up for.
Our Ratings:
Strong Recommend*
Recommend
Weak Recommend
Don't Recommend
Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf. However, the manufacturer did give us the product for testing and review purposes.
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I've been using Mendeley (free online and desktop app) recently, and sounds like it has the same functionality as Papers, with the added social networking features. You can also add highlights and annotations to PDFs within Mendeley. Whichever app gets used, it's really nice to have PDFs organized this way, isn't it?
@Jasmine: yes, it's available for Windows and works offline:
http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/
I have used both papers and mendeley, and have found mendeley the best for my needs. However, they are both excellent programs, worth a try.
I find mendeley's ability to recognize pdf's indispensable, and its the thing that really won me over. Additionally, having access to my entire library on the fly (you can sync your computer library to your online profile) is perfect, as I fit the 'forgetful academic' stereotype quite well.
At my school, I know a lot of academics that use papers, and a lot that use mendeley, but even more use the print/binder/sticky/handwrite/copy+paste method, which is ridiculous. I am a happy man every day I get a new person on any one of these programs.
I have been using Papers for 3 years, and it has definitely made organizing my near 1000 research articles so easy! You can sort and search papers by title, journal, author, etc. and also connect to the online databases to find "recent articles by this author" and other useful things like that. I don't use online search repositories (like Google Scholar) to look for articles anymore, I just search them within Papers. You can enter an automatic EZproxy(?) address for institutional login for full text access.
Every time I write a new research paper, I create a new "collection" and use it just like the Cite-While-You-Write functionality in EndNote. Then when I am done, I just export the collection into EndNote format and Format Biobliography! So easy-peazy!! <3 <3 <3
I took advantage of the trial version of papers a few months ago. I was really excited about it at first, but it seemed a little cumbersome after a while, especially since it didn't recognize some of the articles I had. I'm still torn on whether or not I want to buy it.