Papers by ReadCube 17+

I used Papers for years as an academic; I loved the ability to paste reference place holders in plain text, and use that feature collaboratively with members of my team. But over the past few years it got buggy and crash-prone. When Readcube started, the rate of improvement was slow and I stayed away. After testing the other options, I finally tried the new Papers again, and it’s much better. No crashes, search works well, and it integrates with Google Scholar on Firefox (althought NOT with Safari). I’ve finally subscribed and stopped using the old Papers.
It’s not perfect; Search has some quirks that take getting used to (like diacritical marks are required) and I haven’t tried shared libraries yet. But overall, a solid program with a good UI and integration with MS Word.

There are several good citation managers that allow importing and annotating article PDFs from a PC. My work flow is that I like to add citations wherever I learn about them, and that means entering my iPhone, while reading and making notes on my iPad. I was a happy user of Mendeley until they terminated the iOS mobile app. Papers is outstanding for this use. I can add references and PDFs instantly from a pc browser add on or directly from the app. While reading an article, it’s easy to highlight, annotate, take notes. A side bar instantly grabs any cited papers that I might want, and another tab finds related articles. It’s easy to organize my library by tags and hierarchical lists. I’m sure there are other fine features but I’ve been too busy doing great research to find about them.

As of 2.70, it’s pretty ok, with lots of room for improvement. Papers 3 was significantly better all around, but since ReadCube owns them now, I expect ReadCube Papers will be importing more and more of their features.

The most important features for me are there though, and import/search especially are working well enough for now.

The reader view UI needs work: The carrier, clock, and battery icons aren’t hidden but merely white in full-screen. Highlighting and annotations are flaky, and there’s no undo button (you have to delete an entire highlight/annotation at once as an object, so small mistakes mean you have to redraw entirely.) Highlighting and annotation also just sometimes just stop working, and I’ll need to exit the pdf to get it back. Export only includes highlights and annotations on the first two pages for some reason. There aren’t options for switching from horizontal paging to vertical scrolling.