Readcube papers login1/13/2024 ![]() Papers 2 was excellent about this, Papers 3 required switching panes completely and was much more clunky. incomplete metadata fields (very important in some fields - I had to give up on Papers 2 when I published some computing conference papers, because not all required citation fields were shown in the app even though they still existed!).accurate ‘fire and forget’ downloading of metadata when you drag PDFs to the app.a good companion iPad app (or easy standards-based way of accessing PDFs from tablets - some apps store these in a companion database that require workarounds to ‘export’ and re ‘import’ them).In the latter two items I would include, for example: Many are lacking features which some or many users would need, or have other limitations.UX is often poor, at best, though this varies a lot.Some, especially those owned by large publishing companies, are definitely profiling you and your data.Some rely on online components, such as for logging in - some friends discovered this to their cost when Mendeley went down a few hours before a major conference deadline and they couldn’t access their references/update their papers.Some try to monetise via ongoing subscriptions - when you are building a life-time collection of data and research materials, this not good at all (and often import/export is limited or incomplete), as you are then tied into paying a subscription indefinitely.Too many of these kinds of reference managers have problems, in my opinion: I haven’t yet tried really committing to it for a project and perhaps it would grow on me with time. I have dabbled with this, which I think is closest to the “old” Papers in terms of a very committed developer and passionate community, but I’m not a huge fan of the interface and when I tried it, found certain things somewhat counter-intuitive. I feel there is a real lack of a good software in this space, especially for Macs - Bookends seems to be the closest. Similarly, editing tags requires switching a pane and is very clunky. In Zotero, this is done through tags, where you can then assign colours to particular tags - but you just get a small coloured square at one end of the item in the list, which is almost invisible. It made visually identifying particular items very easy - I used to have book reviews purple, for example. To take one example of this: when you assigned a colour to an item in papers 2, the background of the whole row changed colour. I previously used Papers 2, which had an excellent UX (although was limited in other ways). However, the UX in Zotero is far from ideal and I find it really clunky to manage different collections and quickly find relevant documents. ![]() ![]() I’ve ended up going with Zotero, because I know my data isn’t locked in (FOSS, works offline without a login), and because it supports the particularly weird citation management in my field via. ![]() I’ve really, really struggled with the choice of citation managers throughout my PhD. Overall the switch to KeepIt from Devonthink has been very positive! Finally, I also use KeepIt as a pseudo-reference manager by storing a file’s bibliographic reference in the KeepIt comments field. I often, however, link a Bear note to a corresponding PDF in KeepIt using url-schemes (and vice-a-versa). KeepIt is quite adept at keeping notes in markdown, plain text, or rich text but I sometimes want to view my notes and materials totally separately so I keep them apart. I also use Bear along side KeepIt - I use Bear for notes and KeepIt for materials (PDFs files and Text files as placeholders for physical books). The biggest improvements over Devonthink (I switched) have been the excellent interface on all platforms, macOS/iOS parity, and the removal of all the Devonthink features I never used. For my academic work and in-progress dissertation KeepIt has been great. Search is robust with lots of options including saved searches, although a bit laggy on my 2016 12” MacBook. It would be simple to export any data from the Mac and still maintain its file structure as all files are stored in the HD as real files and folders, not a proprietary database - just copy and paste (I don’t think you could preserve groups or labels, however, there is an option to sync tags with macOS’ tags which should preserve them). Files can exists in as many groups as you want and have many tags but can only be in one folder and have one label. Files can be organized by folders and by groups within those folder as well as by tag and by colored label. I was never been in a danger of losing data, sync just stalled on the Mac. I had one major syncing issue about a year ago the dev was very responsive and we got it figured out. Yes, it uses iCloud and has been quite reliable.
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