Thursday, January 17, 2008

Best application ever

For you lucky ones with a macbook in the lab, you should check out "papers" which won the apple design award for best scientific application. It's like an itune for science. from the website:
"Search for articles using the built in search engines, retrieve and archive PDFs, and read and study them all from within Papers, your personal library of Science."


13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, without question, the best application I have ever used. The best thing about it by far is how receptive its designers are to tweaking it constantly and making it more usable. When it first came out, it was pretty rough around the edges. (That, and they're scientists themselves, so they know what other scientists need in a program like this.)

The Doc said...

Apart from the working all in one window (tabbed browsing), Papers seems to do everything that Endnote XI does.

Endnote also allows you to insert references seamlessly into Word and WordPerfect, and is a dream to use for changing a document around.

Also, Endnote comes with Paper templates... so it'll format a paper for, say, Nature, but when it gets rejected, will change it back to The Korean Journal of Fish Nutrition just as easily.

Endnote XI (or whatever the latest version is called), also lets you search PubMed, or just about any other database, as well.

Anonymous Coward said...

Can endnote be used for paper archival? I could really use something like that...

The Doc said...

Sure can. Actually, what you do is keep all the papers in a folder, and it keeps a record of which one is which. So it keeps a link to them in the record in Endnote.

So yes, basically, it does.

Bayman said...

that sounds pretty sweet. i'll have to upgrade from version 4 or whatever i've been using

Alfred Russel Wallace said...

Papers is an awesome application. I use Endnote to manage citations etc when writing... but does it really allow one to set up a database of all your pdfs that can be searched in Spotlight fashion? I have so many pdfs in my Papers library now that I rarely search PubMed I just search in my library... sure is handy when your on a long flight and reading/writing...

While on the applications subject... I hate Blogger. Everytime I go to log in it refuses me. Tells me that my email address doesn't exist... then I tell it I can't remember my password so it emails THE SAME ADDRESS IT JUST TOLD ME DOESN"T EXIST!!! Then I change my password... again. It's like deaing with a *&*^**&* bank!

Bayman said...

ARW,
Haven't been having troubles myself. Sometimes when I mistype my password it says what you're getting even though the email is correct. Maybe password be the problem?

Maybe I will have to get one of those new powerbooks and carry it around in a envelope so I can use Papers...

The Doc said...

The latest Endnote, X1, behaves the same as the old endnotes... but it will keep a record within the Paper record of what pdf is the paper, and allow you to open it directly from the paper record.

Also, Endnote allows you to add your own keywords to the paper record so you can quick find the papers you want in the way you want them.

It doesn't open them in a tabbed format like papers apparently does.

Anonymous said...

I find EndNote difficult to work with, especially after searching PubMed and going back and forth between my library and PubMed (the "author" value keeps needing to be changed). It would also be nice to have a tabbed interface and keep all the windows together. Further, I don't think EndNote allows you to restrict a search to Abstract, Author, Journal, Keywords or Notes.

The other problem I see is that EndNote is $300 US while Papers is $42 US. Sure, you can have your department purchase it, but I bought my own copy and also have personal PDFs (i.e., CV, instruction manuals, articles of interest) cataloged. More importantly, Papers makes it MUCH easier to search PubMed and title your PDFs. It was mentioned above, but the authors of Papers are frequently releasing updates with bugfixes and new features.

Nevertheless, there are some downfalls to Papers, principally the PDF viewer. As an alternative, I use Skim.

Anonymous Coward said...

If only they would develop for PC... I also think this could be the type of app that Google should develop... imagine if your library was accessible anywhere on the web, and shareable between members of the lab. Oh one can dream...

Anonymous said...

The other problem I see is that EndNote is $300 US while Papers is $42 US.

People PAY for software?

Kevin Zelnio said...

If only they would develop for PC...

People PAY for PCs?

Bayman said...

People PAY for PCs?

No. Just for the parts.