#EXPORT READCUBE PAPERS SOFTWARE#

Considering today’s technological umbrella, I don’t think asking for a half-decent reference management software is a tall ask. Finally, if I ever wanted to use Word or another WYSIWYG editor, citation management would’ve become… a chore. bib file with a sub-selection of citations for particular projects. Also, it would’ve been painful to generate a revised. I knew that such a strategy could become unwieldy real quick for an ever-increasing number of papers, especially if I wanted to go inside and edit some references along the way (something that always happens). This approach was also not entirely appealing.

#EXPORT READCUBE PAPERS UPDATE#

How about simply keeping PDFs somewhere on my iCloud with a fixed naming convention and separately update a BibTeX file with reference information taken from Scholar? I knew I didn’t have to start from scratch because Papers 3 could generate one giant text file with all my references in BibTeX format. Furthermore, retrieving some hard-to-get PDFs or scans of papers I already would’ve been challenging. However, unlike what Spotify does for music (for me), after some thought, I realized that this approach would become troublesome when I’m in the field (>month downtime with no internet, etc.) or traveling.

Why a reference manager?Ĭonsidering the aforementioned problem, a fleeting thought I had was to archive/delete all of my 5000+ PDFs, save a BibTeX file, and give in to the constant connectivity of the attention-economy era: download PDFs from their source whenever I needed it. Ever since Papers was bought over by ReadCube, I have been worried about the future direction of the software as well as the long-term durability of my reference management system. The lack of significant updates was frustrating, and even when updates were offered, they were largely unable to keep up with operating system advances. Over the years however, there were many growing annoyances. The Papers app on iOS was especially useful, with its selective Dropbox-sync and night-reading features. I have been using some version of Papers on the Mac and iOS for over seven years now, and I have really enjoyed using it on both platforms. Support for the desktop version of Papers 3, my erstwhile reference management software of choice, was discontinued and sales ceased last November.

Export readcube papers