I've not upgraded to Papers 3 from Papers 2 because of the terrible reviews. However, staying with Papers 2 also has its problems. The Citations feature in Papers 2 often crashes when entering references. I submitted a bug report, and after three responses over six weeks, the programmers were unable to solve the problem and reported that it will not be fixed/updated (unsurprising, I guess). I was offered a free copy of Papers 3, which was nice. However, as I wrote above, given the terrible experience people have had with Papers 3, I'm loathe to upgrade to it.

Papers 3 is a mess, I'm sad to say. I downloaded it and imported my Papers 2 database in order to see how it worked. In the process of importing, all the work I have done on editing and merging authors was gone -- for one person in Papers 2 I have five iterations of the same name in Papers 3. Going back through the authors to take care of this would require days. In addition it's now far harder to list, compare and merge authors. Everything is more complicated, period. Also, there's nowhere on the website to talk to other users about such issues, even though it's called a 'public discussion' -- everything is viewable to staff only. There might be an easy fix for these problems but there's no way to know. I'm perfectly capable of learning new software, but the documentation has to be there.

I regret buying Papers 2. The app was poorly designed with too many broken or poorly functioning features such as proxy management and the utterly useless Livfe collaboration site. These and many others problems weren't addressed or fixed for paying Papers 2 customers.

I also bought Papers 2 only three months before the new version and unlike nicer developers (there are plenty out there) the company gave no forewarning of their Papers 3 development and release schedule so I ended up with software that in all likelihood had already ceased development and vital maintenance support.

The €29 upgrade price is too steep to tempt me to do so considering my frustrations with the previous version, which despite promises didn't enhance or simplify my workflow at all.

Another thing they don't seem to want you to know (based on their website) is that they were bought out by Springer, hence the Windows version and the strangely sleep-inducing demonstration video posted on their site.

Bibdesk is the gold standard for serious academic authors in my opinion. Has all the functionality you need (much of the extra functionality in other apps is gimmick), it is rock solid, and is free. The workflow with Tex/Lyx/Word, and preview / skim, (plus the internet) is perfect. For some Mendeley may be an individual preference, but I have run both extensively, and for me Bibdesk is clearly superior.

Why you would rather pay for Papers, a dysfunctional and costly software, is beyond me.

I bought the Papers 3 for Mac beta, v 3.0.9, and I cannot recommend it. I do recommend, and will continue using, Papers 2.

I've used Papers since v1. I have a fairly large library with over 14,000 references, each with an attached pdf.

Issues I've had with Papers 3:

1. The process of importing my Papers2 library to Papers3 broke some of the links between my references and their attached pdfs. After the import, I noticed that some of my references didn't have their pdfs anymore, and other references had the wrong pdfs attached. It appeared that Papers3 lost track of attachment data during the import process.

I was able to confirm this by opening the same references in Papers2. References that indicated no pdf, or the wrong pdf, in Papers3 were undamaged in Papers2.

So far, I have no fix for this issue. I've tried doing a Papers Library rebuild in Papers2 before importing to Papers3, have checked and repaired permissions on the Papers2 library files before import, Papers3 still breaks and changes reference/pdf links during import, seemingly at random.

2. The import process also generated duplicate references. Again, I confirmed this by checking the reference in Papers2 - no duplicate then.

3. Papers 3 is *very* slow compared to Papers2. Running on my MacBook ProR with an SSD, Papers2 is ready to go 8 seconds after launch. Papers3 takes over 3 minutes (!) to open the same library. Slow launch persists after several days (so it's certain that Papers3 wasn't indexing its new library).

4. The UI has been prettied up at the expense of functionality. The library view shows fewer references at a glance due to display formatting changes. It takes more clicks now to accomplish some common operations than in Papers2.

5. Some behavior is odd. Drag & drop of a reference with its linked pdf creates a file with an alias attribute, but a couple of megabytes size. Exporting the same reference as "pdf files and media" creates the pdf file it should, about 200KB size.

There's more, but that's enough to give you the idea. I don't have enough confidence in Papers3 to use the product to manage information that's critical to my work. Presumably, the product will get more reliable as it goes through its beta development. More problematic is what I see as the developer's turn towards a pretty UI at the expense of user friction using the app. Reliability and speed do me more good than esthetic similarity to iOS7.

Downlink is to older version not recent one (2.5.5); http://downloads.mekentosj.com/papers_255.dmg

Download works, but dmg fails to mount.