READCUBE PAPERS CHROME SOFTWARE
READCUBE PAPERS CHROME OFFLINE
READCUBE PAPERS CHROME FREE

Good pick if you rarely need to read or write offline and don’t mind bad UI design. It only works online and has great integration with Word and Google Doc.

READCUBE PAPERS CHROME FREE

F1000Workspace is a free web-app, very functional but a little claustrophobic.

If you need a desktop-only (offline) app that works well with Word, with the potential of useful future add-ons (e.g., Zotfile), this is the one for you.

Zotero is free, open source, and NOT owned by Elsevier.

Probably the most complete ecosystem (desktop, web, and mobile app), and may improve with the merged ReadCube-Papers app.

ReadCube doesn’t have tagging (wtf) and, while the other necessary features are there, there are some superfluous ones slowing things down.

Papers 3 was great, but it’s going downhill fast and you should not buy it.

Other than that, it’s a question of whether you prefer a traditional (offline) app or a web app, whether you will read on a mobile device (phone/tablet), and making the trade-off between feature-rich but clunkier, or spartan but lightweight. Most of these apps are on an equal footing with regards to the core functionalities: importing, filing, reading, and creating citations, though the small features that do differ can make or break it for you. And if you’re a seasoned academic that just happens to be displeased with your reference manager, keep on reading. If you’re just starting your research career, be it graduate or undergraduate, I hope this guide will inform you on which app you want to use for the next few years based on your needs.

READCUBE PAPERS CHROME SOFTWARE

Each software is judged based on those categories, so that if you skip some of those steps in your workflow, hopefully the other sections will still be informative. Click to expand workflow flowchart.īriefly, the steps are: get paper (Scan/Import), file paper (Organization), read paper (Reading/Note-taking), and later, find paper (Storage/Search and Citing), with the additional requirement of syncing (Offline/Sync) between two devices - I do all my writing on my laptop, and ideally, I will be doing all my reading on the iPad. With that in mind, I drew a flowchart of my workflow (programatically generated in Markdown, with mermaid!). In particular, I do most of my reading electronically (and on a mobile device), and I often receive/find one-off recommendations from the lab or Twitter, which is a pain to manage without disrupting my day. One last thing before we get to the good stuff: my preferences are specific to my literature reading workflow, which might be different from yours. You can find the detailed notes for each by clicking on “Click to expand” in each section, which I highly recommend if you’re considering a particular app based on the feature highlights. These are aimed at helping you make a decision as quickly as possible, based on your needs. This post is rather comprehensive, so I’ve collapsed the detailed comments for each app, leaving just the intro and summary. This took me a good month or so, but hey, now that I did the hard work, you don’t have to. So I decided to bite the bullet and try all the ones I could get my hands on to see which one I liked more.

To my extreme surprise and exasperation, I found none. Naturally, I flipped through the internet to see if there exists a comparison of the more recent tools available to help me make a decision. Long story short, I’ve been using Papers 3 for about 2 years now, and I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed by it over the last few months.

Today, I’m writing about one of the most commonly used tools across academia - the reference management software. How does the saying go? “You can’t paint a Picasso with a paint roller?” I’m sure that’s not how it goes, but the point is, having good tools is the foundation of doing good work.

Readcube papers chrome