Organize Your PDF Files with Papers
Thursday, March 19, 2009 by Luke Turcotte In my first semester of college, the documents folder on my computer grew from a measly 300MB to its current size of 9.03 GB. The culprit? The thousands of lecture slides and journal articles in PDF format that students are bombarded with only a regular basis. Sure, it’s easy to file them away in the appropriate class folder on your computer, but what happens a month or a year later when you try to find that key quote for essay among a myriad PDFs. I introduce to you, Papers.
Photo property of Flickr user Max_au
Papers is a Mac only PDF manager that will change the way you work. It allows you to catalogue, tag and search within your PDFs. Papers lets you search for and download articles from a dozen of the most popular online repositories. If you are science student, especially one who is conducting research, this is heaven. Papers will let you organize your articles by author and will search the repositories for any articles written by the same author. You can also group your PDFs by collections, allowing you to organize files from for a specific class or project in a group. Papers supports PDF annotation and provides space to jot down notes along side the paper you are reading. Papers’ UI is beautiful, it has a logical workflow and is quick and stable. There is an iPhone/iPod Touch companion to papers that allows you sync articles with your Mac, as well as take take notes and search PubMed. Papers is relatively expensive at $45.00, and $9.99 for the iPhone app. However, I do suggest giving the 30 day trial a shot, you may find it to be an indispensable tool.
Have you been faced with similar file management issues in college? Post your solutions in the comments section.
Reader Comments (7)
I will attest to Papers. It is a great piece of software. And for any student doing research it will become essential to your life. It is still missing some essential plugins. For example, I don't believe there is a plugin that makes it work with Academic Search Premier.
As to the price. I believe if you search the FAQ it says if you email the company and tell them you are a student they will give you a discount.
Um...anybody know an alternative that's free and not Mac-only?
what a bummer i use a pc i guess i need to get a mac
@Mimzy @Almir
I haven't heard of anything quite as powerful as Papers, although you can iTunes to organize your PDFs. Here's a link
http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/geek-to-live--organize-your-pdf-library-with-itunes-240447.php
I use Evernote ($0, Windows/Mac/Linux/web) to sort all of my class materials.
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Try Skim. It's PDF-annotation powers are unmatched, and it's geared at workers in the sciences. It's free and open-source, but Mac-only and not yet available on the iPhone. Also, it can be used in tandem with Papers, if you set it as the default PDF reader in Paper's preferences.
http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/