William F. Garrity

By Rachel Courtland in the May1, 2008, issue of Nature: "Programs promise to end PDF paper-chase."

Researchers are buzzing about a new type of software that allows them to manage their research paper downloads from online journals much more effectively.

One of the most popular programs is Papers, a commercial offering released last year with a similar interface to iTunes, Apple’s successful music-file organizer. Papers and similar programs are able to read a file’s ‘metadata’ so that a batch of PDF (portable document format) files can be sorted by, for example, author, journal name or year. Users can add new files to their hard drives by ‘dragging and dropping’ or use the program to search and download directly from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore and the arXiv preprint server.

Papers was developed by Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis, then working at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. The idea was borne of the frustration they experienced in trying to sort and search papers they downloaded from online-access journals. Griekspoor refers to Papers as a “personal library of science” — the full text of papers in the library is indexed and easily searchable, he says.

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Mac only!