Sort your journal library out with Papers for Mac

Reading peer-reviewed journal articles is one of the most crucial parts of studying science. Whether you’re an undergraduate trying to write a literature review or a researcher trying to find a new method, journals are the primary way of sharing new information on research topics with both specialists and generalists. Most, if not all journal articles are published online for download in PDF format ahead of their print debut. If you or your institution have a subscription to the journal, or it’s an open journal like the PLOS series, then you can easily find and download the article with PubMed or another peer-reviewed journal index. Once you’ve got the journal of course it’s a simple matter of just loading up your PDF reader of choice to read it. For one article that’s fine, but imagine you read several articles a day and end up a library of journal articles totalling into the hundreds, how do you keep them organised?

Endnote by Thomson Scientific is the current industry standard bibliography program and it’s recently been updated in the last few iterations to support attaching PDFs to citations. If you’re on a Windows PC, Endnote is about as good as you can get, but those on a Mac have a lot more choice.

Of course you can use Endnote on the Mac, but it’s not a very ‘Mac-like’ experience. Mekentosj’s journal library program Papers, is one great example of a very Mac-like and effective piece of software. It handles the downloading of citations and the articles associated with them, lets you view and edit the meta data of each paper, plus Papers lets you read the article both in preview and full screen reading mode right from within the application. One of the killer features of Papers is the ability to just drag and drop a PDF article into the program and it’ll do the rest for you. Should the meta data in the PDF not be good enough to identify a citation match, Papers will then ask you to select or search from a couple of options for the correct citation. Of course once you have your library imported into Papers, which you can do from Endnote amongst others, searching it with Spotlight is a breeze, by keyword, author, year or journal. The searching doesn’t stop there as Papers also lets you search PubMed and a few other indexes directly from the program. Organising your articles in Papers is also incredibly easy to do using drag and drop to simply move articles into and out of folders or collections. For instance if you happen to have a particular project you’re researching and a subset of your journal library directly applies to it, you can quickly and easily create a separate folder in your library and sort your downloaded articles in there.

Perhaps the thing that sets Papers apart from all other journal library managers is the ability to sync with an iPhone and iPad app. Wirelessly syncing your iDevice means you can take all or a subset of your journal library with you on the go for reading or reference. Papers syncing goes both ways however, enabling you to search for, download, read and modify the meta data of journal articles on your iPhone then sync them back to your Mac. A simply fantastic feature if you happen to be at a conference and someone mentions a great paper you should check out.

There’s no doubt that Papers is a slick and capable journal library organiser and it has a lot of nice features, but it lacks one crucial feature to make it the be-all and end-all ‘iTunes for journals’ and that’s a cite-while-you-write function. Papers can’t itself insert citations into your word processor of choice. You can however export a library of citations to your cite-while-you-write engine of choice, be it Endnote or even the reference manager built into Microsoft Word 2008. It’s not a bad solution, but Papers just begs to have it’s own word processor citation engine, and it means you can’t just rely on Papers to get your work done.

If you just want to organise and read journal articles on your Mac or want to take them with you on your iPhone, then you can’t got far wrong with Papers. Costing €29 (about £25) from Mekentosj.com, Papers for Mac is also available with 40% student discount. Papers for iOS costs £8.99 and is available from the iTunes App Store.