Other similar services include Mendeley [0] (now owned by Elsevier, I believe), gPapers [1] (less functionality, looks defunct), and good ol' bibtex files.
[0] - http://www.mendeley.com/
[1] - http://gpapers.org/
Similarly, note that Papers is owned by Springer.
But I still use Papers! It is really effective for downloading a lot of papers fast to get up to speed on a new topic area. It's also cool to have all my papers and notes synced between devices. Download at work and read wherever.
It's Jimme here. I am the guy building Qiqqa.
Qiqqa is not trying to be a reference manager like Zotero or Mendeley.
As I do my PhD I am building something that is excellent at helping me (any anyone else who wants to use it)
READ, UNDERSTAND and DIGEST the papers in my library using Computational
Linguistics techniques, and not LOCATE/DOWNLOAD/COLLECT the papers.
Zotero's incredible strength lies with its ability to download reference matter from hundreds of sources - and that is something Qiqqa would never need to compete against.
It is great to see a community at work writing the hundreds of parsers and scrapers of the various online libraries.I like jabref, but it doesn't have papers' ability to grab a bibliographical entry for a PDF...
Reading the Web site the only advantage that I found is that it allows you to use your Dropbox account to sync the files, while for Mendeley, if you want more space than a free account offers, you have to pay.
I wrote a couple of 'plugins' for it, one for looking up papers through Alfred, and another for quickly importing papers from the arXiv and from INSPIRE (the high-energy physics database).
I tried Zotero standalone and Mendeley also, but the switch to BibDesk was a fresh breath of air. If you're using a bibtex workflow, I highly recommend it. It isn't the prettiest program out there, but it is fast, stable, and functional.
And it allows you to do stuff that commercial software couldn't do, like use a headless browser to fetch metadata from the ACM website using your credentials (hey, I pay for my membership, and I have very reasonable rate limits built in my system). Sadly that's why it's the one piece of software I'll likely never open source :'(
Colleagues were always surprised to hear about my system, but honestly I believe that any tool you'll use consistently throughout your life is worth building yourself.
I ended up dropping out of my PhD for startups :) but I'll probably go back to research in the long term, and am looking forward to adding more features to it.
I spent countless hours reading articles all over the place, only to find most of them are the utter shit imaginable, you wonder how they even get published.
I am sure that, around the world, many people are like me, preparing a thesis or something.. So this shit gets read a whole lot of time, when it should in fact collect electronic dust on a long forgotten server, until it commits suicide.
Also, anyone preparing some work has to go over that to do a "State of the Art"... Where's the field at right now..
This work gets repeated. Why wouldn't it be done once every time an industry is moved forward, so you just pick up there and bring your improvements, instead of reinventing the wheel every time.
It's "something" where academic articles are reviewed, and I don't mean "peer reviewed articles" and what not.. More like Amazon with books: Readers write what they think the book is lacking, or is not.
You can search for the article, and it displays reviews..
This is because in many articles, the authors are major assholes abusing keywords: They include keywords, you read the article to find that they really only had one sentence talking about it.
They pack it with keywords in the hopes of getting searched for.
It can be a client for example, peer to peer.
You install your client, you choose some themes and keywords you are interested in.. And then each time you start-up, it shows "relevant articles" for you to read and review.
It'll help you stay updated on a current industry, a particular branch of an industry, etc..
Zotero is cross-platform; it enables me to sync my papers in whichever way I choose and its bibliographic data extraction and PDF downloading work much better that that of Mendeley, because it does this from your computer, not via their servers, meaning you have access to all the fulltexts that your institution has access to.
I've used Zotero to write a bunch of papers, book chapters and part of a book. It's very solid.
Using Pandoc and its referencing tools requires .bib files, and Mendeley's automatic .bib export means I can just type citekeys and expect them to work. And if you want your text to make sense as a markdown file, you want your citekey clean and informative. It's been a while, but I think Papers used citekeys that didn't conform to any sort of spec (something like :_blah instead of Author:DATE), and pandoc simply couldn't read them.
I use Mendeley now. Doesn't have the cool research tools figured out as well as Papers, but it does what it's supposed to do, which is to store my citations in a way that makes it easy to put them in a paper.
If they fixed these issues, it would be great. I ended up using Mendeley in the meantime.
I build a small web application that full-text-indexed all of the papers I needed back then instead.
I'm kind of surprise that nobody has cloned BibDesk from OSX. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's BSD-licensed and functional.
I'm dreaming of a program that checks papers of all fields for me and suggests those with similar ideas in areas I'd never look at for me to read..
By the way, as a non-academic, I've always wondered how I could keep up with the latest developments in the field of information security/cryptography. Are there simply some key journals that one has to keep track of, or are there other more frequently updated sources that one should read?
If one or the other app happens to have features, tradition, or lock-in, in its favor, so that it will better turn your time and focus into increased subject mastery, that's what really matters.
I've found that having my papers organized by subject matter, searchable, and always available on any device, is a huge advantage in learning new stuff.
Over the years, it adds up, and you end up knowing more, which is helpful in lots of ways. To be crass -- it could be the difference between a 4% raise and a 5% raise for someone making $100K/y ($1K in the first year). That's a big deal.