"Papers" your personal library of science
Papers is an application for Mac OS X which is a boon for anyone who deals with many PDF files. The UI and feature set is highly focused on being a serious research tool for scientists.
Once installed Papers collects all of the PDF’s on your machine and offers to copy them to your new repository in ~/Documents/Papers. You can copy the PDF’s or move them.
From there, papers offers an iTunes-like or browser-like interface for managing y our PDF collection for for getting new PDF’s.
Online repositories you can search out of the box are:
- Google Books
- Google Scholar
- PubMed
- Web of Science
The program is cognizant of the source and other meta-date of the paper so you can organize your collection by Author, Journal, your own rating, Publisher, and so forth.
I did a search for “pathfinding games” using the “Google Scholor” repository and found over 700 results, most of which were available for free.
While you can always just use Google to search for these papers:
pathfinding games filetype:pdf pathfinding games filetype:ps
and get over 20,000 results, the advantage to using Papers are as follows (as far as I can tell):
- You get organization around your local collection
- ps files are automatically rendered and read as easily as pdf’s
- You can choose to download all search results and begin to perform detailed searches
- Filter results on criteria such as where full text is available for free (not available for all repositories… each repository plugin supports only criteria that it can handle)
- It’s just cool. It’s a very slick OS X interface that just makes sense.
Go check it out.