AppFlow

Isn’t it nice to have everything in one place, nicely organised and searchable!  I like things to be organised, including PDFs.  Normally you’d do this with folders, sub-folders and more subfolders. But what if you then want to reorganise by Author, rather than Title?   It’s tricky at best.

Enter papers.  Papers is an app for organising your PDFs.  Originally designed for Science papers, it works brilliantly for all forms of PDF.

Interface

The papers interface is pretty self-explanatory.  All focus is on the center split screen where you have your list of PDFs on top, and a preview of that PDF on the bottom.  The right pane contains information about the PDF.  Science papers will display the journal it came from, author(s), abstract etc.  Books and others contain information relavent to them.  This is a very nice, at-a-glance summary of the document.

Matching

One of my favourite features of Papers is it’s connectivity with loads of repositories.  Google Books, Google Scholar and PubMed are a few of the many supported.

When you load a PDF into Papers, it gives you option to match it.  This means that any missing data on that PDF, such as the author, publish date etc.  Papers can retrieve this information to make searching easier.

Sorting

Papers gives you a whole host of options to sort your papers.  You can drill down your papers by Journals, Authors, Last Import, or custom Collections.  For example, I have a collection for my Science papers, and another one for my e-books.  This is a nice, convenient and easy way to keep types of paper separate.

In the same way that smart playlists exist in iTunes and smart shelves exist in Delicious Library, smart collections exist in Papers!  These can gather all papers with certain keywords, or even extract words from the abstract (blurb).

Conclusion

Papers is a really handy way for storing all of your papers in a nice, convenient database.  It is also a great application for collecting data about the papers you have, and even downloading new ones from the repositories.

Whether your a scientist, student or just someone with a lot of e-books, Papers is easy to use.  It’s iPhone/iPad syncing is also useful for taking your own, personal library of research with you.