Papers for iPhone

I’ve been using Papers for almost a year now, and I love it! This “personal library of science” offers a very pleasant way to keep track of all scientific literature that I collect.

It solves the question whether you should store the articles by author, by journal, by topic or whatsoever. Here you store them in one database, and then you can search by author, journal, content, and lots of other options. You can put articles in folders, but you can also use smart folders that look automatically in your database for papers that fit your criteria. Add comments, copy references, read full screen, or send directly by mail.

Well, today I noticed they also have an iPhone version of Papers. Downloaded and installed it, tried to sync some article lists to my iPhone and nothing happened. The solution was easy: read! The dialog told me to make sure the desktop app was open. No, it was not, because I did not read well. After opening it, everything went very smooth.

It’s a nice app, worth the $9,99 (€7,99) that they charge. Still, reading PDFs on a small screen is not really nice, because you keep scrolling through the document in all directions. So it’s definitely not a replacement for reading on the desktop, but I consider it as a nice addition to take some papers with me.

But if possible, I’d rather use the desktop app. For those who wondered: no, I am not on their payroll, and I don’t have any other financial interest in the company. I would just like to keep using the product and future updates… and as the full version is available for only €29 I hope it will be available for a long time.

I stick to my conclusion from the methodology-section in the eLibrary: “a doctor’s and scientist’s dream made real”. At least for me.