April 24, 2007

Get Your Fix: Papers 1.0

Posted by Eric at 12:15 am | Category: Science, Technology

For those who are interested, Papers has reached version 1.0. I’ve written before about this Pubmed-integrated literature organizer and viewer.

In addition to a whole slew of bug fixes, my favorite new feature in this version is that Papers has gained built-in integration with proxy servers and authentication pages, which most of us need to use in order to access institutional subscriptions to journals. I, for example, have to append “ezp1.harvard.edu” to all website domain names (so, something like www.sciencemag.org.ezp1.harvard.edu). Up until recently, I’d been using some Perl scripts and a patchwork of programs to let me switch over to the institutional subscription with keyboard shortcuts whenever I needed (yes, it’s only 16 characters, but it was maddening); now Papers will do it for me!

Papers won’t be taking over my entire workflow (Pubmed still doesn’t update as frequently as, say, my email news alerts and RSS feeds), but it’s definitely taken over every aspect of actually reading papers.

UPDATE: Ok, so Papers’ authentication and proxy-server support is actually broken right now (at least, it doesn’t work for me). Not so great, especially for a supposedly 1.0 release, but I still appreciate the other bug fixes.

UPDATE 2: With the new bugfixes, Papers now works with the Harvard authentication server (at least). I can’t verify it for other servers, but it works swell for me!

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6 Responses to “Get Your Fix: Papers 1.0”

  1. Apollo Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 1:36 am

    Neat. I’ll have to see if this version is more stable for me than when I tried it before.

  2. mekentosj Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 4:31 am

    Hi Eric,

    Just saw your post, thanks for the heads up! You are right, the proxy system is broken in the 1.0 release, we mention this in the what’s new section. The reason for this is quite simple, we don’t have access to a location where we can actually test and develop this. We are working though on getting this fixed together with people who do work in such an environment. If people would like to help us out, drop us a line at feedback AT mekentosj DOT com…

  3. MadGenius Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 10:47 am

    hmm…mac user.

    How does it compare with something like JabRef?

    I use linux, and something called KBib.

  4. Eric Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    I’d say JabRef is closer to Endnote than it is to Papers. I don’t really see Papers being a reference manager (at least, not yet), so much as a PDF library organizer with a science focus. It has some bibliographical organization, but no citation-formatting support, and no bibliography generator. If I wanted to write a paper, I’d have to export the Papers library out to Endnote or BibTeX.

    On the other hand, you can use Endnote and BibTeX frontends to organize PDF libraries, as I did before, but I think Papers does a much better job of consolidating the workflow into one place and making it less painful.

  5. Brian Says:
    April 25th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    You might try http://www.hubmed.org/ rather than pubmed if for no other reason than that they have a direct link to the full text article right on the search page. Sometimes you just don’t need to read the abstract to know that it’s the paper you’re looking for.

  6. Eric Says:
    April 26th, 2007 at 4:27 am

    I really love Hubmed, mainly because it lets me subscribe to literature search results.

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