Looking around the average scientist’s writing room, there is one thing you will certainly find: scientific publications, not one, two or 10, 20… depending on how much time you already spent working at this place, chances are good estimated numbers go in the five hundreds two thousands.
And we are talking real paper…
Until now it is very uncommon to have this organized electronically, out of the tradition of not reading on screen you do not organize papers (how everyone nicknames scientific publications) electronically but after you printed them. As introduced in my recent software review of SKIM, I predict that there will be a change in the way we are handling information, out of mere amount of information we are expected to juggle with nowadays.
Papers is a software that is able to help you remain in control of your virtual library- searching, archiving, exporting for bibliography in your publications, all these things can be performed with this suddenly very affordable time saver.
Let me explain how Papers is improving your everyday data mining and processing:
1. Getting the paper: you visit Pubmed, Google or any other depository and search for your topics or authors from within the program, save your searches locally, are able to very easily specify the search terms you defined: year, author, journal – the more precise you define your search term, the better!
These features are available through the website of Pubmed as well, but, be earnest, are you THAT common with it all that you remember the html tag for “first author”? I don’t and I am glad to have a frontend doing this for me while I can concentrate on the searching.
2. Handling the “piles of paper” – two points worth mentioning:
- importing the papers: you’d be amazed to watch papers tag your library- depending on how you saved the pdf upon importing about 2/3 of your stuff will be automatically recognized and matched to a fully searchable tag list! Matching a paper that is not automatically processed through this routine is equally easy: seeing the pdf you mark the last name of the first author, a pulldown will appear, you select “first author”. Do this with a couple of specific tags, first and last author should suffice.
- searching and processing: within Papers you search everything by entering information into the common search box- be it part of title, abstract or any author- if your library has the paper, you are presented with it. Finally you can organize the papers, similar to iTunes, into (smart) folders and export them for use in common bibliography software like Bibtex, Sente and Bookends.
The big thing with Papers is that even if you decide not to use the program anymore, your articles will still be organized according to the folder structure the program created: /year/author. From this point of view left alone to avoid duplicates it is nice to import all your papers and let them be organized.
Describing this award-winning piece of art I only touched the surface, so get yourself a copy and simplify your chase for information!
Licences of Papers are available for €29. For more information, visit the developer Alex Griekspoor’s website.
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