So how do you chemists out there organise your literature? End-note, Reference Manager, some fancy ChemDraw software, Excel sheet, card file, neurons? All of these are very very expensive and I suppose they work reasonably well, as long as you are happy with it that’s what matters. How efficient is it at finding exactly the reference you need when you want it? Or those vaguely remembered reaction conditions or reagents. I suppose that’s a function of the data you put in, apart from the obvious information. I use one for the Mac called Papers (I think it’s also available in Windows format these days.
Back in the earlish days of the Apple store I obtained a copy of Papers 1, by God it was wonderful. It was everything I needed, stored all the PDFs, abstracted the metadata from them, all you had to input yourself was the abstract and any comments you wished to make. And you could create smart collections depending upon the terms you used. It searched the internet for your publications and patents and for people that so kindly referenced your scientific masterpieces. In short it was just what I needed, except it didn’t make the coffee. It’s not designed for any particular branch of science and Papers 1 would not include any chemical structures, or any other type of graphical information. That was, and still is, a shortcoming for me because chemistry has it’s own language of structures and reactions. So, I could not directly import ChemDraw files nor mole files. You could synchronise your library to your iPad and your iPhone and even read the literature while waiting in the daily traffic snarl-up.
Then along came Papers 2!! Guess what, they completely broke it. It would do nothing, and what’s worse all the data you painstakingly added went up to the electronic dustbin in the sky. Their help line servers or humans broke down under the weight of all the complaints and e-mails fired at them, they should have left it alone, but evolution must take its course. A week or so after the initial release a complete re-vamp of Papers 2 appeared. This actually worked. Patches and upgrades came and went and it eventually became useful again. THEN, then, they were acquired by a company which shall be nameless but I think the chairperson (political correctness here, please note) may be Elmer Fudd? Well good for the original developers, I’m glad they made some money from their creation, at least I hope they did. But would it be so good for the consumers? Well time will tell, but Papers 3 now has been born.
Papers 3 presents one with a completely redesigned user interface, full of functionality and buttons to click. It costs around $70 for the full version or $39 for an upgrade. Here’s a screen shot of the new interface:
Sorry its so small, but I think you can see it. Papers 3 no longer synchronises with your iPad or iPhone but uses Dropbox. Now my papers library is about 3GB in size and growing rapidly, my Dropbox is only 5 GB, so I’m going to have a problem very soon. On the left are your “smart folders” and the search tools, along the top are the details about the paper and the window in the middle , well that’s the paper. Right hand side has all the publication details, including keyword input. The problem is the thing is very slow, it takes ages to put your input into the correct place. This may be due to my old Mac (three years old) or the software, its probably a combination of both. The software also seems to have some of these!
In fact quite a few. The keyword list seems to be case sensitive and the search function does not always work and the program crashes now and again, maybe does not like chemistry?
No doubt with coming patches and updates they will manage to iron out the problems. I just wish they had not sold me a beta version. However, I can recommend this software, in spite of its challenges and you get a 30 day free trial, so go look it up. I’m not getting anything for writing this, by the way.
