Tag Archives: nerdiness

Papers is awesome

If you’re a fellow graduate student, you’ll know what I’m talking about: that mass of .pdf’s you’ve got kicking around your computer.  Journal articles.  The literature.  That stuff you gotta read.

I’d always managed smaller research projects okay with folders inside folders inside folders in the Finder and some text file indexes.  But a dissertation project is an entirely different ball game.  You spend four years on one project and you’re going to accumulate hundreds of .pdfs.  So I finally tried out this program a friend recommended to me:

Whaaaaa!  It’s like iTunes for journal articles.  You can see folders, a list, and front-page previews all at the same time – and, yes, the folders can have multiple labels.  You can read any paper fullscreen within the program just by double-clicking on it, and – be still my heart – all the biblio data is right there!  It’s just there in the panel on the right!

I should probably not be so excited about this program.