Comments on: Why I use BibDesk instead of Papers

By: A

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:53:04 +0000

For those who use Bibdesk and Jonathan Sick’s ADS-to-Bibdesk entry, it’s worth noting that he’s now created a tool that automatically replaces Arxiv entries with the corresponding journal entries. Just run the script every week or two, and it should keep the bib library up to date. Very easy to use, and one of the last pieces missing for Bibdesk to be a perfect tool for my needs.

http://www.jonathansick.ca/adsbibdesk/index.html

The very last piece is a way to make my bibliographies list the arxiv identifier for arxiv-only entries, and only for the arxiv-only entries. I can make it show the arxiv identifier for every paper, but that’s almost as annoying as having any arxiv-only paper only be listed as “Arxiv e-prints”.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:26:56 +0000

My two cents: I was a Papers fan (I even bought the mobile app for iOS). Moved to Lion OS on my Mac. I would need to re-pay to get Papers 2.0 and the old version simply got impossible to handle with freezes/instabilities. Moved to BibDesk my library (export from Papers, import from BibDesk), seems to do perfectly good what I need (in particular organizing / storing PDFs).
I consider the idea to re-pay for a (minor) update of Papers quite ridiculous. I will stay with BibDesk.

By: Oskar

Oskar — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:31:20 +0000

try this: say you have two keywords one named “hip fractures” (with 2 items) and the other one “hip fracture” (with 3 items). Click on “hip fractures” and modify it into “hip fracture”. You’ll get a single keyword with 5 items.

By: Oskar

Oskar — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:21:38 +0000

Victor, re 3, you can customise the way BibDesk exports stuff. Look at the templates feature, you can remove all the {}. I use BibDesk to automatically generate my HTML, PDF, even DOCX CV’s. I don’t use it for papers only, but for other type of “documents”. Some kind of academic database.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:58:31 +0000

I use the JabRef, which is java based. From the description above, it sounds very similar to BibDesk.The advantage here is that it is cross-platform, and so can run on Linux, Mac or Windows. Its native database format is bibtex.

So my solution is bibtex db plus the jabref .jar file in my Dropbox and I can carry on editing my paper whatever machine I am on.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:42:36 +0000

I have both, and use both. I love Papers for reading pdfs as many have said.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but whenever I export a .bib file for a latex paper, and compile using aastex and astron (or ApJ) style it fails miserably. About 60-70% of the citations are not correct for a variety of reasons. Several of my colleagues have the same issue. I’d love to say goodbye to bibdesk and do everything using just 1 program, but as long as bibdesk does the bibliography correctly, and papers.app doesn’t, I’m suck.

By: Jo

Jo — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:35:34 +0000

One of the biggest diferences noone has mentioned is support for supplementary material. Many articles may involve more than just pdfs.
Bibdesk supports any type of file (images, docs, bookmarks) while Papers only supports pdfs. More importantly, bibdesk allows you to link all those files to the same record, which Papers still does not allow (at least easily).

By: Nico

Nico — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:58:42 +0000

For me, Papers and BibDesk are actually complementary. I use Papers for managing my pdf, references, etc. I just find Papers fantastic for searching within the pdfs, ior using the smart folders and collections.
Then, when it comes to write a paper, I export a .bib from Papers and fine-tune it with BibDesk. Very happy with the result so far.
A major step forward would be for Papers to recognise changes made in the .bib and have a two way coupling rather than a one way export. But apart from that, I really think that both are equally useful in their own way.

By: Conor Mancone

Conor Mancone — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:00:44 +0000

One of my collaborators introduced me to papers. However I’m the sort that likes to reinvent the wheel, so rather than using it I spent a week or two making my own online reference manager:

http://www.mancone.net/refs/

The biggest advantage is that it is online, so you can access it anywhere and don’t have to install anything. It doesn’t have quite as many fancy features though (I did put this together myself after all). It has a generic bibtex importer and will fetch abstracts automatically from ads. You can browse and search the references like you normally would, and it also has a category view. You can create a category tree and put any reference in as many categories as you like, and so it acts much like a bookmarks menu. Not much in the way of documentation right now…

By: Carolin Villforth

Carolin Villforth — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:21:24 +0000

As my laptop is running linux (kubuntu) I can’t use BibDesk or Papers. I am using zotero which is a add-on to firefox ( http://www.zotero.org/ ). I am pretty happy with zotero.

zotero positive points:
-it’s free and it works on every operating system (as long as it runs firefox)
-articles can be imported directly from ADS, arxiv or pretty much any other page, just by clicking a little symbol that appears, you can also import many articles at a once (i.e. all results of a ADS search)
-you can create your own collections, exporting collections to bibtex is extremely easy (that means, you don’t have to export your whole library to bibtex if you write an article)
-you can add your own keywords and search by keywords
-you can attach pretty much anything to your articles
-you can “relate” articles to each other

zotero downsides:
-zotero does not have a native pdf reader, pdfs are added to the article as attachments. However, you can open the pdfs with only one click using your favourite pdf reader.
-in earlier days, updating firefox used to be very exciting as there was a chance that zotero was not compatible with the newest version. But I didn’t have any problems with that lately.