MacSingularity Archive

Two PDF Paper Catalog Utilities

June 13th, 2007 by admin

Updates at the bottom

The somewhat poorly named Papers 1.1 won an Apple Design Award today. The program is designed to help scientists track the bazillion PDFs of various journal articles we download. Unfortunately, it integrates with PubMed (I don’t even know what that is but presumably for medical journals?) but not ADS. However, it has a plugin architecture and an SDK so maybe somehow someone can make a NASA ADS plug in for it. And, the developers are taking suggestions for other databases.

However, in any event, it’s $39. (Try doing a google search for for papers ads plugin and you’ll see what I mean by not being named well … ADS isn’t the best abbrevation either.) Updated – Students can get a 40% discount.

A more generic “iPhoto for PDFs” is the $34 Yep. You can tag, search the content, and organize your PDFs. No attempt at helping you build bibliographies, etc., though. (Papers presumably can export to bibtex, but I don’t know how well that’ll work if it’s not grabbing tags from ADS).

I plat to try out both programs and then write a little more. Yep, for example, will just find all the PDFs in folders you specify. You can include specific folders or exclude them too. Perhaps you don’t want Yep to keep track of figures … or perhaps you can never find where you saved the PDF figure you made and you do want it to track figures.

While I’m mentioning these programs, there’s also the more generic “store anything” program Yojimbo which has a much broader scope but also can store and catalog PDFs, though it doesn’t just track all the PDFs you have wherever they are, the way Yep does.

Update 1 Ok, Papers may actually be pretty good. I imported my dissertation .bib bibtex file and it parsed it without any trouble. Now, it of course didn’t magically know where the local PDF was, but it did have the URL which was in the .bib file. So, it has its own webkit powered web browser and took me to the journal’s page (say, ApJ). At which point if I clicked on the PDF link it automagically downloaded the PDF, stored it locally, and associated it with the proper entry in Papers’ library. Nice. Though, it doesn’t understand the NASA ADS based bibtex abbreviations so things look like \apj and such.

Update 2 Apple doesn’t give their design awards to chumps. The full-screen PDF viewing feature of Papers is nice; the whole program seems quite useful.

Update 3 Ok, it actually doesn’t use the URL in the bibcode entries but uses the DOI, so papers without a DOI (namely, several PASP papers I tried) Papers could not find online. Even though, the bibtex had an adsurl entry that would point it to the ADS abstract. So, that is somewhat disappointing, but presumably it’s something they can fix without much trouble.

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