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PapersCurrent Version: 1.8.5

$14.99
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Papers, your personal library of Science, and winner of the Apple Design Award for best Mac OS X scientific computing solution on the Mac, is now available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Papers puts your entire research literature database in your pocket, available at your fingertips wherever you go; whether you're at a conference, in class, visiting your peers, on the couch or on the road.

iTunes Rewind 2009 | Ranked among the top 30 Best Apps of the Year 2009 in the UK iTunes store

REVIEW | "A couple of years ago, a Mac OS X application came along and blew my socks off. Now, the company behind Papers, Mekentosj, has done it again, this time by bringing its killer app to the iPhone in a timely manner. It doesn't disappoint." -- Ars technica, ★★★★★

"When I found Papers on the app store, I realized that I had found a solution that was not only easier, but helped me conduct research in ways I didn't even know I needed with a mobile device." -- WhatsoniPhone.com, ★★★★★

UPDATE | Papers for iPad now allows you to highlight and create notes on your PDFs!! Simply select the text by dragging your finger over the text (it works with multi-columns too!) and tap highlight, tap it again to change the color or copy the text. Or tap and hold for a second and add a note anywhere on the page.

UPDATE | Papers now comes fully optimized for iOS4, supporting fast app switching as well as support for the high-resoluton retina display on iPhone4. Your research articles never before looked so good!

OVERVIEW | Papers was redesigned from scratch to be a perfect and beautiful fit to both the iPad and the iPhone and iPod touch. Browse through the hundreds of articles in your library with the flick of a finger, lookup the papers written by a certain author or published in that well-known journal, organize your library in collections and add your rating or flag great works. Papers comes with a stunning PDF viewer built-in, especially on the iPad you never want to deal with normal print-outs anymore! And of course allows you to add your thoughts and notes to the articles you read, all at the spot, wherever you happen to be.

But what if you forgot to add that one paper? Or you want to check out what's new this week? Papers comes with 8 built-in search engines that give you access to millions of articles at any time: ACM, NASA-ADS, arXiv, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, Pubmed, and Web of Science. Search the world's largest repositories, visit the publisher's websites and even download new PDFs to your library and start reading straight away, it's that simple. And you can even wirelessly exchange articles with other Papers for iOS users as well, or send an email to your friends and colleagues to tell them about your new findings and ideas.

And last but not least, Papers of course synchronizes wirelessly with Papers on your Mac. But also if you use a PC or don't use Papers on the Mac it works great as a stand-alone application as it lets you download PDFs straight from the publishers onto your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. You can also upload PDFs through iTunes or import them from an email.

With Papers, the world's knowledge is never more than the flick of a finger away. Your personal library of Science, wherever you go.

Visit our web site for a screencast to find out more!

REQUIREMENTS | We recommend at least 100Mb of free space for storage of PDFs and article metadata. Use of built-in search engines and web browser functionality requires an active internet connection. Some search engines may require an institutional subscription. Syncing requires a wireless network connection and Papers for Mac (separate purchase).

LIMITATIONS | Annotations are not yet contained in ema
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Papers Screenshots


Papers Review

Desktop scholarship managers gets a portable companion

Managing a huge collection of research papers has been the bane of scholars, no doubt since the beginning of written scholarship itself. In my particular case, mismanagement led to file cabinets stuffed with misfiled, crumpled, duplicate, and sometimes incomplete unreadable copies. Good luck finding papers or searching through the ones you may have forgotten about.


Research on the Road: The current version of Papers gives you mobile access to a number of online repositories for scholarly research, including PubMed.

The arrival of the PDF file, optical character recognition, and published online journals has presented a slightly different set of searching and sorting problems. Still, the organization problem remains. The desktop version of Mekentosj’s Papers () brings the ability to manage journal articles, search your library and search the most common online repositories into a single desktop program. Now, Mekentosj brings this capability to the iPhone for on-the-go scholarship.

Papers for iPhone tries to replicate much of the functionality of its desktop cousin and provides tools for reading and searching for scholarly articles. On the management and reading side, Papers for iPhone allows for synchronization of up to 1,000 papers from the desktop via a wireless connection. Files are specified by folder, in a way similar to the synchronization of iPhoto image collections and iTunes playlists.

If you’re not using your quota of 1,000 there is the ability to synchronize random files based on a given criteria. You can also constrain the direction of the synchronization—files can be synchronized only from the desktop to the iPhone or can be synchronized bidirectionally, allowing any new papers acquired on the iPhone to be copied back to the desktop library. I’ve not found the auto-fill capability particularly useful but I suppose there are folks who occasionally need a random read.

The second major piece of the app’s functionality is its ability to search online databases. Version 1.1 provides access to the ACM, ADS, arXiv, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, PubMed, and Web of Science databases. These are largely science-centric databases with JSTOR being the most broad. Interfacing with the wide variety of search engines is a bit challenging, as is evidenced by the fact that Google Scholar searches were broken in Papers’ initial release as a result of changes made by Google. The desktop version of Papers allows the various search components to be updated ‘live’ and Mekentosj has been quick to update when search providers change their products. Due to the constraints of the iTunes App Store, Papers for iPhone won’t be nearly as nimble when new updates are necessary since each update has to be cleared through Apple’s vetting process.


Sync Sensation: You can sync up to 1,000 papers from the desktop with Papers, much in the same way you sync photos and iTunes playlists between your desktop and mobile device.
Switching between search engines on the mobile version of Papers is a little confusing, as there’s no obvious way to switch once you have started a search. You must click in the search box, as if to enter new search terms, and the list of search engines appears. I also experienced significant difficulty with the app’s proxy capability (e.g. the ability to access the search engines as though you’re on your institution’s network even when you’re not). Sometimes I was able to get connected and authenticated but, even when authentication was successful, downloading PDFs was a mixed bag—sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Some of this is likely due to idiosyncrasies of some sites (I had the most trouble trying to get papers via ScienceDirect) and their interaction with the iPhone’s WebKit implementation. Still, if Papers for the iPhone is going to be truly useful, this needs to be worked out.

I found the app’s preferences slightly annoying in that they live in two locations, neither entirely intuitive. Some settings are in the “Help Center” while others are buried in the search engine panel. However, on the iPhone, preferences are a bit messy across the board—some live in Settings, while others are located in specific apps. Papers adds yet another confusing paradigm.

If you need access to scholarly research on-the-go, then Papers is certainly the go-to application on the iPhone and iPod touch. Unfortunately, this early release is reminiscent of the initial release desktop cousin—a great start that falls flat in a few areas. If the trajectory of updates are similar, I’d expect to see a more solid, usable application very soon.

Papers is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.x software update.

[Flip Phillips is an associate professor of psychology and director of the neuroscience program at Skidmore College.]

Critic Reviews of Papers iPhone App

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User Reviews of Papers iPhone App

3 Macworld User Reviews
647 iTunes User Reviews View »

Our user review snapshot

  • 87.0%
  • 87.0%
  • 93.0%

Our user reviews IN DETAIL:

Needs to Save Proxy

This is a great companion to the desktop version and I only wish there was a way to automatically save the proxy username/password.


Good app, hoping for feature update

This app is quite useful if you need a quick reference to your articles. I am hoping for different read modes though and other features to really make it into a productivity app.


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