A helpful reader pointed me to Papers. It is a well thought out program for managing academic papers on OS X. I’ve looked it over briefly and it looks pretty impressive. It integrates with PubMed and other online repositories allowing you to search and download PDFs while autopopulating all the metadata fields.
Papers also allows you to take notes as you read articles and keep them with the PDF. It seems to be setup for working with existing PDFs, so there doesn’t seem to be an built in OCR capabilities.
If you are looking for a way to organize your research Papers is worth checking out.
I agree with you: at a first glance papers just seems impressive. However I can’t use it because I’m a linux fan. So I suggest having a look at *zotero* (www.zotero.org): an open source firefox extension with similar features.
I’m quite happy with zotero. It can import bibliographies from various websites (among the others google scholar, jstor, science direct..), add notes, tag pdf, export to bibtex etc.
The only thing I miss is the possibility to annotate pdf natively. Every time I have to open either “foxit reader” or “acrobat reader” but that’s only a minor fault. :)
LaTex users should definitely consider BibDesk as an alternative to Papers. While Papers is better for browsing articles, notetaking, and finding related articles, BibDesk has some browsing features and is ideal for maintaining an awesome .bib file. Also, BibDesk is free while Papers is not.
http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/
@Roberto & Kelle – Thanks for mentioning Zotero and BibDesk. I’ll have to check those out.
@Mark,
Zotero is a very promising program and is under rapid development. I tried it out a while ago, but opted for Papers because of it’s ability to automatically download and save papers in a folder structure (i.e. year, journal, author, etc.). A citation plugin for Word and Open Office was recently added to Zotero as well.
Papers does not currently have annotation capabilities, but the developers have said it is planned for a future release. I currently use Skim to do my PDF annotation. The only issue I have encountered with Skim is that you have to export the PDF if you want a PC-using colleague to be able to see your annotations. Leopard supposedly has some improved PDF annotation features, but I am still on Tiger for the time being.
Another new one that could be worth a look is a.nnotate for web based
pdf annotation.