A few posts ago I asked how everyone organised their literature collections. I suggested an app. for the Mac called Papers. Now as I said, this began life as an App, not available from the App. store (but received a prize from Apple for the best scientific software) written by a private individuals. These guys did a great job with Papers 1. Unfortunately it’s gone downhill since then and particularly since their sale to Springer! I’m happy that these two could make some money out of their idea but I just knew this would happen since the sale. It has parallels to the ChemDraw situation. Their support was never particularly great but since Perkin Elmer took them over it got 1000 times worse, a look at their fora will convince you of that.

I’m sorry for this software as it was great until Springer came along Papers 3 is just as bad as the initial release of Papers 2. It crashes all the time, corrupts databases, doesn’t import properly, doesn’t add keywords, authors, etc. properly and so on. I was starting to think that my Mac was breaking, but it seems not as I found these two blog posts on the software. So it seems like I’m not alone here.

Now I have had some contact with the support staff this consisted of  several e-mail exchanges. They were polite and trying to be helpful, which is fine, but I need a solution that works, as do others. They may well be “part time” support staff within Springer where management has dumped this on their lap, or they may be “outsourced” support people (probably the latter). However, they need to provide a workable solution and not leave one in the dark for weeks on end. I mailed them again start of last week and still have not had a reply!

Before anyone comments that I should use Mendeley, I looked at it and it’s fine but my lit. database is >5GB in size and being a miser I don’t want to pay for >4.5GB’s.

Springer get your damm act together and provide proper support and FIX THE BUGS. 

I apologise to anyone who may have obtained this software after reading my initial post.