Papers by ReadCube ١٧+

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.

Perhaps the only reference manager you can use accross your phone, ipad, and PC seamlessly. Love to take notes and read in depth from my ipad so the ability to do annotations and highlighting is a fantastic feature, but always need the PC for deep searches, so its great I can share the library across all my devices. Tagging feature is very useful but could use some support on ipad as you can’t search tags and must scroll through a long list. Would like to see more features in regards to display/ordering of columns in main library spreadsheet view, as any changes aren’t permanent and reset when you leave the page. Could also use some work with finding and downloading papers from ipad, always works on PC but the institutional logins don’t seem to work when accessing from ipad often.

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.