Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis (mekentosj.com) have written a wonderful program for Mac users that lets them manage their collection of science papers called Papers. It is a great tool allowing one to search pubmed, grab citations, organize them into useful smart groups, download & save the PDF in organized manner, export the citation to your favorite reference program, and to search the downloaded PDFs all in one application. It is very handy. It is still in the public preview stage but I have found it to be very useful & easy to use, well worth the small fee to buy. Have no fear though buying now enables you to use both the public preview and the 1.x versions of the software. The duo are the ones behind 4Peaks, a great DNA sequence viewer, EnzymeX, a wonderful DNA sequence analysis/editing tool, Lab Assistant, an electronic lab organizer (sticky, timer, lab journal all in one), and IRNAI, oligonucleotide design program, all of which are free. I use the first two programs frequently in lab. I can't comment on Lab Assistant and IRNAI though they appear to be solid programs.
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Update- Papers is now available as version 1.0. Downloaded it and will be giving it a test drive this week.
The Science Sampler, Daily Transcript and Thoughts from Kansas also have discussions about PDF organizing including using iTunes.
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6 comments:
I must shamefully confess that I only recently started using EndNote. But I'm fascinated by how lovely it makes the writing process, so I'm excited to check out other programs that might also help me out of the dark ages of self-organizing references. Thanks!
Post-Doc no problem. New to EndNote in the last year as well. It does help greatly but on a dissertation it can lead to scary moments as all the many references are being compiled. My mother when she was in graduate school in the mid-90s used an earlier version of EndNote, it could be more trouble than it was worth back then. They really have advanced the program.
I used BiBTex to organize my citations. Of course you have to be a LaTex nerd to use it. But thanks for the heads up on this new Mac program. I'll check it out.
Ranger one of the people in our lab also used to use BiBTex with LaTex in his old lab which was a computer based lab. Our PI is computer savvy and in fact headed up the redo of the department's website but he gets very attached to his programs. It took him awhile to get over WordPerfect (great program but was having compatibility issues with what became default for everyone else in lab, MS Word). He is now big time into EndNote. The rest of the lab isn't exactly computer savvy, though it is getting better (no one asks me how to scan anymore, it is a start).
One of the advantages of LaTeX is that your documents are kept in ASCII format. So 10 years from now when you want to look at that MS Word document, but your current PC can't read it for whatever reason, you are screwed.
There is a learning curve to LaTeX, but I think its worth it. Check this out:
LaTeX Style and BiBTeX Bibliography Formats for Biologists: TeX and LaTeX Resources
http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/latex.html
Ranger that is a great feature. It is what drives me up the wall with MS products especially Word and all the little changes they make that cause you to upgrade your EndNote everytime you upgrade Word. Will check it out and maybe I can get my lab to change over.
Papers does seem to be able to play with BiBTex in addition to EndNote.
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