Alternative to Papers

December 26, 2008 7:16 PM

I recently found a fantastic program for managing research literature on OSX and I'm looking for a similar program for Windows and Linux.

The program for OSX is called Papers and is just beautiful. I really love the interface and it connects to all kinds of databases to make importing papers very easy. Is there anything like this for Windows or Linux?

posted by Aanidaani to computers & internet (10 comments total)

EndNote is probably the closest.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:28 PM on December 26, 2008

Have you seen Zotero? It's browser-based but might be of use.
posted by Toekneesan at 12:51 PM on December 27, 2008

There's Referencer for Linux.
posted by PueExMachina at 6:18 PM on December 27, 2008

Zotero is awesome. Referencer is useful if you use latex I guess, if you combine that with saving the papers with a proper filename that can be picked up by gnome-search-tool or "locate". You may also look at Incollector.
posted by a007r at 8:22 AM on December 28, 2008

One thing Zotero doesn't (to my knowledge) do that papers does is take an existing source (like a pdf) and automatically fetch metadata from, say, pubmed or google scholar. If you want it to full-text index your pdfs, you need to follow-through with the instructions under preferences for enabling pdf2text.

If I'm wrong, please let it be known.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 10:14 AM on December 28, 2008

Zotero looks like a good option. I'll check it out. Thanks!
posted by Aanidaani at 7:29 PM on December 29, 2008

This recent NYT blog post compares the two. She prefers Papers, and reading it, I wish there was an equivalent for Windows.
posted by col_pogo at 9:29 AM on December 30, 2008

(Correct NY Times link)
posted by Utilitaritron at 9:17 PM on January 1

I've since found a good multi-platform (OSX, Win, Linux) program called Mendeley. It does all the things that Papers does.
posted by Aanidaani at 3:04 PM on April 6

Wow, since people are still posting I'll add that Zotero has since added the (take PDF) -> (return metadata) function.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 11:15 AM on April 7