

Papers – Desktop app for finding, organizing, citing academic research - kcon
http://www.papersapp.com

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privong
Interesting that this has appeared here now, since it's been around for quite
a while (I first saw colleagues using this nearly 7 years ago). I've only
heard good thing about it, though I've never used it myself (not being much of
a mac person).

Other similar services include Mendeley [0] (now owned by Elsevier, I
believe), gPapers [1] (less functionality, looks defunct), and good ol' bibtex
files.

[0] - [http://www.mendeley.com/](http://www.mendeley.com/)

[1] - [http://gpapers.org/](http://gpapers.org/)

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coherentpony
What does papers provide over Mendeley?

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alceufc
That is a very relevant question, since Mendeley is free.

Reading the Web site the only advantage that I found is that it allows you to
use your Dropbox account to sync the files, while for Mendeley, if you want
more space than a free account offers, you have to pay.

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mturmon
The cost is incidental for many users, considering what is at stake --
basically, continued professional competence due to keeping up to date with
the state of research.

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mikevm
How does Mendeley help to keep up with the state of research? I thought it
just lets you manage the papers you read. Does it actually give you access to
paywalled papers?

By the way, as a non-academic, I've always wondered how I could keep up with
the latest developments in the field of information security/cryptography. Are
there simply some key journals that one has to keep track of, or are there
other more frequently updated sources that one should read?

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coherentpony
Aim for journals with a high-impact factor. Researchers are encouraged to
publish there. Unfortunately there's usually a pay wall for those. For free
stuff you can check open-access journals. Some open journals also have a high
impact factor and there's recently been a push for publish to publish only in
open access journals.

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alceufc
Also, in some computer science areas conference papers can be another useful
resource.

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coherentpony
Good point, I forgot to mention that.

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guygurari
I use BibDesk [1], which is open source and comes bundled with MacTeX. It is
useful and very fast by itself, and it has a full AppleScript API which makes
it extendible without having to dig into the code.

I wrote a couple of 'plugins' for it, one for looking up papers through
Alfred, and another for quickly importing papers from the arXiv and from
INSPIRE (the high-energy physics database).

[1] [http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/](http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/)

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k2enemy
I'm also a big fan of BibDesk. I used to use Papers 1, but it was always a
little buggy. Then the paid upgrade to Papers 2 was a big kick in the shins
(paying to upgrade to an even buggier program with some features removed).

I tried Zotero standalone and Mendeley also, but the switch to BibDesk was a
fresh breath of air. If you're using a bibtex workflow, I highly recommend it.
It isn't the prettiest program out there, but it is fast, stable, and
functional.

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peatmoss
I started with Mendeley (used it all through my masters) and have gone
entirely to BibDesk for my PhD. I keep .bib files in git, and sleep very well.
For writing papers, I use biblatex-chicago if I have a choice. My workflow
might look old to an outsider, but to me it feels dependable--an elegant
weapon for a more civilized age.

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GuiA
In grad school, I wrote my own academic research "organizer" using Django (the
framework makes it really easy). It takes a few weekends of work, but then you
have something really cool and suited to your needs.

And it allows you to do stuff that commercial software couldn't do, like use a
headless browser to fetch metadata from the ACM website using your credentials
(hey, I pay for my membership, and I have very reasonable rate limits built in
my system). Sadly that's why it's the one piece of software I'll likely never
open source :'(

Colleagues were always surprised to hear about my system, but honestly I
believe that any tool you'll use consistently throughout your life is worth
building yourself.

I ended up dropping out of my PhD for startups :) but I'll probably go back to
research in the long term, and am looking forward to adding more features to
it.

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Jugurtha
Cool. Here's an idea you should definitely look into (if it's not you, I'll
look into it when I finish my studies).

I spent countless hours reading articles all over the place, only to find most
of them are the utter shit imaginable, you wonder how they even get published.

I am sure that, around the world, many people are like me, preparing a thesis
or something.. So this shit gets read a whole lot of time, when it should in
fact collect electronic dust on a long forgotten server, until it commits
suicide.

Also, anyone preparing some work has to go over that to do a "State of the
Art"... Where's the field at right now..

This work gets repeated. Why wouldn't it be done once every time an industry
is moved forward, so you just pick up there and bring your improvements,
instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

It's "something" where academic articles are reviewed, and I don't mean "peer
reviewed articles" and what not.. More like Amazon with books: Readers write
what they think the book is lacking, or is not.

You can search for the article, and it displays reviews..

This is because in many articles, the authors are major assholes abusing
keywords: They include keywords, you read the article to find that they really
only had one sentence talking about it.

They pack it with keywords in the hopes of getting searched for.

It can be a client for example, peer to peer.

You install your client, you choose some themes and keywords you are
interested in.. And then each time you start-up, it shows "relevant articles"
for you to read and review.

It'll help you stay updated on a current industry, a particular branch of an
industry, etc..

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kaybe
Well, once in a while someone publishes a review paper that does that. I found
them quite good.. not as sophisticated as your idea though, but it exits.

I'm dreaming of a program that checks papers of all fields for me and suggests
those with similar ideas in areas I'd never look at for me to read..

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cpbotha
I remember that OSX colleagues used to be quite enthusiastic about Papers. As
a Linux and sometimes Windows user, I used to use Mendeley quite intensively,
until I rediscovered Zotero, which is open source, and for my use case much
better than the competition.

Zotero is cross-platform; it enables me to sync my papers in whichever way I
choose and its bibliographic data extraction and PDF downloading work much
better that that of Mendeley, because it does this from your computer, not via
their servers, meaning you have access to all the fulltexts that your
institution has access to.

I've used Zotero to write a bunch of papers, book chapters and part of a book.
It's very solid.

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cormacrelf
Papers had two downfalls for me, which were that it had no functionality
similar to Mendeley's sync to .bib option, and it made weird citekeys when you
manually exported lists.

Using Pandoc and its referencing tools requires .bib files, and Mendeley's
automatic .bib export means I can just type citekeys and expect them to work.
And if you want your text to make sense as a markdown file, you want your
citekey clean and informative. It's been a while, but I think Papers used
citekeys that didn't conform to any sort of spec (something like :_blah
instead of Author:DATE), and pandoc simply couldn't read them.

I use Mendeley now. Doesn't have the cool research tools figured out as well
as Papers, but it does what it's supposed to do, which is to store my
citations in a way that makes it easy to put them in a paper.

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ceeK
I tried to use this recently, even going as far as paying for the iOS version
(whilst on the Mac trial). Unfortunately, it was too slow and clunky on my
Mac, which is admittedly fairly old (mid 2009). The iOS app also crashed a
lot, and wouldn't sync particularly well.

If they fixed these issues, it would be great. I ended up using Mendeley in
the meantime.

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_xo_
Does it have usable bibtex support nowadays? The last time I tried using it
(~4-5 years ago), that was the reason that I did not end up using it.

I build a small web application that full-text-indexed all of the papers I
needed back then instead.

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drodgers
Yep. I just installed it and BibTeX is an export option.

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ckrailo
Anybody interested in a place to discuss papers and have a wiki-like area for
things like links to other papers, links to algorithm implementations,
summaries, links to blog posts, etc? If so, what would you hope to get it out
of it?

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jestinjoy1
No Linux Version :(. Think Mendeley is the best one from GNU/Linux point of
view

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peatmoss
Except that, because it's not open source, it doesn't make it in to the
package repos. Also not Free/Open Source, if that's of importance to you.

I'm kind of surprise that nobody has cloned BibDesk from OSX. As mentioned
elsewhere in this thread, it's BSD-licensed and functional.

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Morgawr
I personally use JabRef with bibtex files. It works pretty well for my needs.

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auxym
I use Zotero. With Lyx/Lyz the workflow is really pleasant.

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mikevm
Has anyone heard of [http://www.readcube.com/](http://www.readcube.com/) ?

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keehun
I wonder how adoption has been? I'm particularly interested amongst
undergraduate students.

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mbreese
I know a few people that use it, including myself. However, I can't bring
myself to upgrade to version 3. It's just too different for my tastes.

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mbreese
I should probably add though that I'm not an undergrad :) I started using
Papers in grad school a few years ago (version 1) and have kept using it since
then.

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cocolos
I just use evernote.

