Papers

3.4.25

3.4.25

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It's still the best reference manager out there. Intuitive, user-friendly, best workflow for finding and then integrating references from any application on the Mac. Great for researching a large library. Unfortunately, it has been bought by Readcube, which still is lagging behind with integrating the functionality of Papers 3. So the future is a bit unclear, but I will stick with Papers 3, until Readcube Papers reaches that level.

They stopped supporting it to focus on Readcube, which is literally unusable now without a subscription. Enough said. Papers users are out of luck and Readcube is just like Microsoft 365 now - not good.

I have ben a Papers user since its inception with version 1. The new version of papers is GARBAGE. To set up the library took three days of back and forth forth customer service. Once my Papers 3 library was finally set in the new system, I find out you cannot use your usual pdf reader as before; now you have to read the papers in the extremely slow and limited reader that comes with the software. Their solution? : you can EXPORT the file as a pdf! This means every time you want to read a paper comfortably you have to clutter your computer with new files!!!! Avoiding this kind of clutter is the main objective of this software! I sincerely cannot understand the infinite ineptitude of these developers. Finally, once I finally got my money back and went back to my Papers 3 library, it did not work anymore as before, it crashed repeatedly and did not sync with my iPad anymore. So now I have to cross my fingers and hope they help me trying to make the best version of Papers so far work again as before. If this does not work, I will have to shop for an alternate software. Any suggestions? What a waste of time, I wish I had never tried Papers 4.

Completely agree with review from habgood58! Having worked with Papers for Mac, v1 and onwards, I find the present 'Redcube Papers'-version a real downgrade. Numerous additional examples of poor functionality in comparison with P3 can be listed, in addition to lack of support (or even return communication from the custom support or developers)! Unfortunately, I was fooled by the very unclear marketing from Redcube, and relied on the good reputation of the 'old' Papers program. Does anyone out there know if and where I can find the most recent 'before Redcube version' for download and re-installation...!?!

New Papers = 0/5, old Papers 3 = 5/5. I have used Papers since version 1 many years ago and by the time it had evolved to Papers 3 it was an extremely useful, user friendly and intuitive bibliographic tool that made searching for articles, organising them and and in text citation when writing manuscripts so simple. It would also search through the body text of PDFs in my library to find phrases or particular words that I was after. When our library stopped using a proxy server and switched to web browser plugin extensions, that effectively killed off Papers as it could no longer access any articles. I learned that Papers had been taken over by Read Cube who now market their software under the name Papers. So thinking all would be fine I switched to the Read Cube version assuming it would an updated or improved version. I was completely wrong. It turned out to be the worst bibliographic tool I have ever tried. On a par with Reference Manager from the late 90's, but without the loading up stacks of floppy disks. Really don't understand why they took over Papers unless it was to kill off a competitor. They have certainly done that by stripping out out nearly every key functionality Papers 3 had and replacing it with nothing useable. What used to literally take seconds, searching for articles, is now an extremely cumbersome trawl through multiple web browser pages using dreadful PubMed/Google style manual construction of search strings with boolean operands and bracketing. Even something as simple as trying to search for an author with a first initial to cut out the irrelevant results is excruciatingly painful. There is simply nothing in the Read Cube version that is any better than just going to PubMed and trying to find stuff there. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, even if was free. As a scientist publishing research articles this app is clearly not aimed at my demographic. I have now deleted it out of frustration and for the time being resorting to asking my coauthors at other institutions who still have proxy access to obtain articles for me.

I've worked with a couple of free reference managers and they all had their issues, so I tried the paid version of papers, but it's much better than the free once. It's buggy, slow and reference information doesn't update probably, updating multiple items at the same time doesn't work properly. If you're hoping to finally get a decent working reference manager and are willing to spend money on it, don't go for Papers3

Can you actually but the program for fix a amount or you have to pay monthly for a year subscription? This will be my first app to organise my research documents. Is it worth it or should I deal with the free versions first?

Pros: User friendly (when it works, which is the exception). Cons: Crashes constantly, freezes, rescinds permission to integrate citations into word documents, unpredictable, which is extremely inconvenient when you are trying to make a deadline. Tech support only periodically responds to requests for assistance. Summary: Would not recommend.

It's still the best reference manager out there. Intuitive, user-friendly, best workflow for finding and then integrating references from any application on the Mac. Great for researching a large library. Unfortunately, it has been bought by Readcube, which still is lagging behind with integrating the functionality of Papers 3. So the future is a bit unclear, but I will stick with Papers 3, until Readcube Papers reaches that level.

Papers 3.4.23 works in Catalina. The app works fine for what I do and I've had it for a long time. But if it doesn't suit you, I've read that Bookends is a good alternative.

Version 3.4.21 (581): the claimed (initial) support for Catalina doesn't work anyway! It won't crash but it's not responding.