Papers by ReadCube

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.

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.

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.