Paperpile 4+

Yes this is your best reference manager!

This is probable my first review on AppStore. The reason I start this review is because you should not miss this wonderful app because this is your best reference manager! As a researcher, I have used zotero + papership to manage the papers I read in the past few years. One of the biggest issue is I am not able to label or categorize my papers very well. But Paperpile saves my life and provides this feature! This app is wonderful, and I definitely recommend this app to everyone who has the need to read and annotate many academic papers! One feature I would highly expect is to support browser. Currently you can only use it on chrome, which means they only provide the extension on chrome for you to save the paper as well (from arxiv for example). It would definitely be a huge help if we can support safari and other browsers in the future! Love Paperfile ❤️

Best reference manager for scientists

Paperpile today is simply the best reference manager for researchers, having used Mendeley, Papers, Zotero, and BibDesk in the past. All aspects of the experience and the app are polished and functional. Adding new papers, downloading PDFs automatically through your university proxy, annotating / highlighting, and organizing your library all work seamlessly. The citation experience in google docs is excellent even with many users even when not sharing the same paper library. The latex experience via Overleaf could be improved a bit with some kind of automatic BibTex export, but overall it’s better than any of the alternatives. Highly recommended.

Developer Response ,

Thanks, regarding Overleaf and BibTeX export. I hope we have some announcements about this soon 😀. In the meantime, we have put together a short survey on these topics to better understand our users' workflows and use cases:
https://paperpile.typeform.com/to/ZbT7oPlU

Great but a little bare bones

I prefer this reference manager over all of the others on the market, but I do find it lacking in a few features that would add so much to the user experience. For one, it would be great if we could upload PDF files of journal articles directly from the iPhone or iPad app instead of having to go on the Chrome web app to do so (because of the way my institution proxy access works, automatic downloads only work around ~80% of the time). It would also be nice to see some more configuration options in the settings menu. I also want the ability to manually edit citation fields. In the case of some older papers going back decades, the digital archiving isn’t perfect so my collection of citations doesn’t look as neat & tidy as I’d like. These minor grievances aside, it is really a great system and I will continue to rely on Paperpile for my references.

Developer Response ,

Thanks so much for your nice words. Our goal is to have all the features in our web app also on iOS eventually. That will take a bit more time.
You already should be able to share PDFs from your iPad with the Paperpile app to add it to your library.