Release Notes
We made some major back-end changes for a release later this week. Stay tuned as we will launch those when ready.
- Papers Import improvements – Continous improvements to Papers import
- Theme Support – Brand New UI and features!
- SmartCite Improvements – Added ability to convert EndNote Documents (In Beta)
- Recommendations to a shared library – Send your search results or recommendations straight to a shared library
- Usage Improvements – Search History, Tags prediction, copy reference titles
- Custom CSL Support – View your SmartCite custom styles on the web or Desktop
- Public Lists – Showcase your library or list
- Browser Extension Updates – Updates and bug fixes
Papers Import improvements
RIS and BibTeX files come from all sorts of places. We’ve vastly improved our RIS and BibTeX import and even added some fancy messages to help you figure out where you(or the place you got it from) went wrong. We’ve also made the import much laxer. So if you have a reference’s date as “Armageddon” we won’t instantly fail on import for the whole file. We just might skip inputting that date.
Theme Support
Everyone was loving dark mode so much on the iOS app that we brought it to you on the web and desktop! By default, the app will use whatever theme you have set for your computer settings. But fear not. You can always switch by clicking on the Papers icon in the top left on the web, or by going to your papers settings on the desktop! We hope you enjoy the new look. I know I’ll certainly sleep better at night without all the extra blue light!
SmartCite Improvements
Ever been knee-deep in the paper and thought to yourself “I can’t switch reference managers now. I’ll lose countless hours of my life and my cat won’t respect me anymore”. We have introduced Convert from EndNote in SmartCite! This will convert your document, citations, and bibliography into SmartCite so that you can continue on your merry way. This is currently in beta so we recommend saving your document before converting. For cat respect, I suggest wet treats. Always works with mine!
Recommendations to a shared library
Have you ever had a shared library that you wanted to import your recommendations straight to? Or maybe you are using the ReadCube search to find new content. Well as of today you can now dump those references straight into a shared library of your choosing. As always if you want to import to a certain list you can always drag and drop.
Usage Improvements
We made several improvements to the app to make research life the best life. The last 5 searches you have made in your library will show when you click the search box and it will try and autocomplete those results as you search. We also added tag prediction so if you start typing a tag it should try and autofill for you. We’ve also enabled you to highlight and select the text on the right pane. So if you want to quickly grab the title or a piece from the abstract feel free to do so.
Select Right pane text
You can now select(and therefore copy) text on the right pane. Makes it easy to quickly grab the title or part of the abstract to send off in an email or put in a PowerPoint.
Saved Searches
See your previous searches and quickly pull them back up! Also, any search query will try and find any tags with that text so you can quickly search for references with a specific tag.
Custom CSL Support
If you have created custom CSLs to use in SmartCite you can now use them on the web or desktop. Simply upload the style in SmartCite and then reload or relaunch the desktop app. These styles will be searchable just like regular styles and will allow you to use them in the export pane to preview the results!
Public Lists
Have you ever had a list or library that you took hours to curate and wanted to share with the world? Public lists will allow you to do just that! To start, right-click on a list or your library and click “Share”. A dialog will pop up and if you click “Create Public List” it will give you the address of where people can find your public list. No one will have access to the PDFs or the annotations you made. This is simply sharing the metadata so people can check out your phenomenal curated library! They can view the PDFs if they are open access(without your annotations or notes) and export the list as a bib or ris file if they want to import it in their own library! You can stop sharing at any time by clicking share again and clicking “Stop Sharing”.
Browser Extension Updates
We have updated the browser extension to support more Journals and to fix some layout changes on PubMed and other publisher websites. We are continually updating the extension so remember if you spot a publisher we aren’t supporting yet to send us a shout at [email protected]
Papers Product Release Webinar
If you missed our May Webinar you can view the recording here.
That’s all folks!
Thanks again for reading our release notes. As always if you have any questions or concerns you can send us an email at [email protected] and we will be more than happy to help out!
- We released a new web app today to get some things out the door. The desktop will be following once we get some issues down.
- Dark Mode – We added the ability for you to switch to dark mode. By default, it will follow your system settings but you can always click on the papers icon to force it one way or the other.
- Allow recommended files to be added to the shared library – We made it so you can see what libraries you have a recommended or searched paper in as well as giving you the option to change the position.
- Tag hovering – In the info panel, you can now see the whole tag if you hover over it.
- Public lists – We also added public lists. Right-clicking on any library/list will allow you to share it with the world. People will be able to see the metadata you had as well as see all the references you had in that list. They can try and import the PDF’s themselves(If it’s open access) but won’t have access to any of your notes or annotations. Let us know what you think!
- Papers 3 Import improvements – Continous improvements to Papers 3 import
- iOS V3 – Brand New UI and features!
- SmartCite Improvements – Added ability to create a list from active references.
- Download Multiple Items – Select multiple references to download PDFs with two clicks!
- Usage Improvements – Show title in the bottom right, Static Preview Eye, Left bar resizing, etc.
- CSV Support – We now support CSV import and export
- Lists on the right pane – We now support showing lists in the right-hand pane.
- Browser Extension Updates – Updates and bug fixes
Papers 3 Import improvements
We’ve added even more indicators of where your library is at for Papers 3 import. Processing the PDF’s and all of the previous annotations could take a long time so we show you how many have been processed out of the total number so in case you have ten’s of thousands of PDF’s and the percentage isn’t moving you can see some updates as PDF’s are processed.
iOS V3.00
This has been a long time in the making! We are very excited to announce that the iOS app has gotten a major overhaul and facelift! There are many new features that you will have to try to out but highlights include:
- Dark Mode
- Annotating of Shared Libraries
- View and Edit SmartLists
- Download full libraries of PDFs for on-the-go access
- See and Edit tags, ratings, flagged items & colors!
As part of this update, we want you to know we are committed to giving you mobile apps that give you powerful and robust research tools at your fingertips. This update will be followed by an Android update in a few months. After both applications have gotten the refresh we will be right back to your regularly scheduled programming of updates with new functionality. Huzzah!
SmartCite Improvements
We’ve added it back! Now clicking on “List of active references” will allow you to create a list in your personal library with all of the references you were citing in SmartCite. We’ve also made the citation “pills” a little more intuitive. Click the gear or right-click to get more options.
Download Multiple Items
With the power of Grayskull, er I mean science, you can now select multiple references and download them to your computer locally. This only works on the desktop app unfortunately because Web browsers don’t like websites that download multiple things at the same time.
Usage Improvements
We made several improvements to the app to make research life the best life. Clicking on the preview icon (eye in the bottom right) will show the preview pane but leave the eye at the bottom instead of jumping just out of your reach. Additionally, if you have just one item selected we show you the title of the item in the bottom left of the status bar. We also added some placeholder text to SmartLists to help get your create SmartList juices flowing. Don’t worry though because we left the popular examples to give you easy access to some SmartLists that are really brainy! “Lookup Details” is now “match” since it makes more sense and everyone was used to that from previous apps. Finally, we also made the left-hand pane resizable so for all of you on tinier screens rejoice!
CSV Support
We are happy to introduce CSV import and export for all libraries. This means you can quickly edit metadata and import it or even take CSV files from search results or databases and import this information directly into Papers. This is a pretty in-depth feature so if you want to take a look at how it all works please take a look at this handy support article. Also, just a note that because of how CSV’s behave this is a desktop-only feature.
Even if you haven’t made it to excel wizard (I’m still a lowly excel nerd myself) this feature should give you more freedom to manage your data in an easy-to-use way.
Lists on the right-pane
We have added the highly requested feature to have Lists show up in the right-hand pane. You can easily see which lists a reference is a part of now and edit them right from here. Clicking on the list name will jump you to the list (much like tags). Clicking on the plus button will open a dialog showing you what lists it is a part of and allow you to create new lists (also much like tags). This feature is available for both web and desktop!
Browser Extension Updates
We have updated the browser extension to support more Journals and to fix some layout changes on PubMed and other publisher websites. We are continually updating the extension so remember if you spot a publisher we aren’t supporting yet to send us a shout at [email protected]
That’s all folks!
Thanks again for reading our Release notes. As always if you have any questions or concerns you can send us an email at [email protected] and we will be more than happy to help out!
Papers 3 Import improvements
Papers 3 import was confusing some people as it did some of the updates live right in front of your eyes! While a neat feature and gave people some indication of what was going on, it ultimately confused everyone and made the situation worse. We have now made some significant changes so that this happens behind the scenes and will show you your library when the transfer is fully done. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to our support at [email protected].
Browser Extension Updates
We have updated the browser extension once more with some good quality of life improvements. For instance, we added the ability to see your Shared Libraries as soon as you create them in the extension. Another one is we auto select a folder now when you are a new user so you should see fewer errors now. Maybe you are not excited, but we love shared libraries and new users over here!
Sync Changes
The desktop app will now sync all libraries at the same time. This should help when multiple libraries have updates and will make syncing faster for all libraries. To see Sync status, you can now see in the bottom left of the desktop to see progress. Since all libraries are updated when sync happens, we also have moved the manual sync button. You can find it under File -> Sync Libraries.
SmartCite Improvements
We have updated Google Docs to have the same features as Word. This means the editing of references works in Google Docs as well. We made a few improvements to help with citing but drop us a line if you are having issues. We are continuing to make improvements so keep sending your suggestions!
EPDF Improvements
The preview pane will now try and search the full-text for what you have searched up top in the library. This can make it quick to find the keywords you are looking for. We have also added viewing and creating tags in the EPDF to help simplify managing your library. If you are using the desktop app you can also import notes that are attached to highlights automatically!
Export pane Defaults
Last release we introduced setting your default style for copying citations. In this release, we expanded that functionality! If the export pane doesn’t detect a previously selected style it will magically match your default style. This will happen anytime you open the app from scratch at the very least saving you precious seconds!
SmartList & Library Enhancements
SmartLists can now get default sorting to them. Want your Elephant Shark SmartList to be sorted always by rating or notes? This feature should help you curate your library just the way you want it. As an additional note and our goal of making the app as accessible as possible, we have also added the ability to add emojis to Library names. We hope this makes all your that much easier. Just check out my Elephant Shark Research and I love Science shared libraries!
Copy Multiple Citekeys
Sick of having to copy citekeys one by one? Well now you can copy multiple citekeys by highlighting multiple references and right-click to bring up “copy as citekey”. This is great for SmartCite for Citekeys! Not sure what that is? Take a look at this explainer video to get started!
Browser Extension Updates
Love update day but hate losing your place? Now the browser extension will remember where the last lists you selected so you can easily add a bunch of research to the same place without having to keep clicking on that same List
Tab Persistence
The desktop app will now prompt if you want to save your tabs while closing. You can always set to always remember in the settings or never remember if want to always start fresh
SmartCite Improvements
You can now choose certain page numbers, suppress authors, and more! We even added the ability for you to fully customize the citation to say anything you want. We hope you enjoy this new functionality and want to know what you think. Just click on a reference to bring up this menu or click on the edit icon in the top right to edit the whole citation.
Set Default Style
Now you can set your favorite style as your go-to for those times you just need to quickly copy a reference. You can even select multiple items in your library and quickly copy all in your chosen style if you need to whip up a quick bibliography.
Enhanced Preview Pane (Desktop)
The preview pane can now work offline if you have downloaded the PDF so it should be faster and work if you are in your secret research lab without wifi. We’ve also added Google search if you can’t quite remember what that word means!
Store Organizations as Authors
Now you can save Organizations as authors by going to your “Edit Metadata” panel and simply adding a “~” to the end to override Papers from treating it as “First Name” “Last Name”. For instance: World Health Organization would be World Health Organization~
- Doi’s for Citekeys – SmartCite for Citekeys update
- Browser Extension Updates – Retraction support
- Sort by notes column – Add additional sorting options
- Edit Authors – Edit author names & order
- Search Improvements – New type & color query
- Metadata improvements – Locate PDF hints
- Papers 3 Importer – Integrated Papers 3 Importer
If you were using SmartCite for citekeys before we know have support for DOI’s to be used in the citekey and we will grab the metadata for you! Not sure what SmartCite for citekeys is? Take a peek here: https://support.papersapp.com/en/support/solutions/articles/30000040861
Browser Extension Updates
Our Browser extension got some additional updates as well. If you find an article that is retracted or withdrawn we will now show a warning on it. This is still in early development and we are working to flesh it out further but you can see the results below. This will not work on DOI’s that are retraction notices. IE some publishers create new DOI’s that are the retraction note. This will only work on articles where the DOI it’s self is retracted.
Sort by Notes
On desktop and web, you can now sort by your notes column. We have added the option to click on the notes column to sort it or you can this do from the sort menu.
Edit authors
The ability to edit authors has been introduced. This took some more work but you can now adjust the name of an author and edit the order the authors order easily. We have also made this work on any field that has multiple names in the field(Editors, Inventors, contributors, etc.).
In addition, you can now edit the order of the tags on a paper. This won’t affect anything as far as sorting or search results but if you always wanted a certain tag first you can now set this up easily.
Search Improvements
We have added two more options for search syntax to help people with advanced search needs. First up is the “type”. You can now find the type of reference by using “type:”. IE you can now search for type:article OR type:book.
Next up is the color search option. You can search for your colors using color:red or if you want to find all papers with a color you could do _exists_:color. You can also use the non-american spelling of colour. However, there will be fewer fireworks.
Metadata Improvements
Our support queue had quite a few tickets about using the Lookup details. We have added some text to help users who are unsure of why they aren’t getting results. Simply put if you do only a part of the title of the paper and then add in the last name of an author or two you should have much better luck looking up these kinds of papers. Let us know if you are still having trouble and our support team would be happy to help out.
Papers 3 Importer
For those of you that are joining us from Papers 3, you can now import your library by using our built-in Papers 3 importer. Instead of having a separate app we now have folded our new importer into the desktop app. This should streamline your import process. If you have trouble getting your Papers 3 library across please let us know by sending our [email protected] an email. Don’t see the option? Make sure Papers 3 is updated to the latest version and you are using a Mac computer.
- SmartCite for Citekeys – New way to cite a paper using your favorite text editor
- Browser Extension Updates – Web clipping support & Bulk Import
- URL support – Additional UI for URL’s and Webpage references
- Bibtex Copy to Clipboard – Simplify Bibtex generation
- Search Improvements – Add easy access boolean operators
- Metadata improvements – Updated metadata order
- ePDF Full-Text Search Results – Panel for full-text search on preview and ePDF
- Download Proxy text – simplify messages for Locate PDF
SmartCite for Citekeys
This update brings a new way to cite papers. While SmartCite has gotten some great improvements over the past couple of months we have developed a new way to cite your papers using citekeys. Check the following support article on how to generate your citekeys and then create your document so that you can format it with over 8000 styles. This workflow works with Pages, Word, LibreOffice, and more so take a look: SmartCite for Citekeys
Browser Extension Updates
Our browser extension got a huge update as well. You can now import on any website that doesn’t get recognized as an article and it will be imported to your library as a web page reference. We also made some changes to the extension icon. It will now grab all of the search results and display them for you. It includes easy link outs to the DOI as well as an option to select all the results and import them into your library. If only one reference is on the page you can add notes to the reference straight from the browser extension.
URL Support
In addition to adding the ability to import websites, we will now show the URL in the right-hand pane. This will link out to the website that is in there. You can use this to quickly navigate to a website you saved. Whether it’s a simple as a link to a reference you want to see we also have seen some use cases of tying the address to a website that updates with new information to give you quick access to updates.
BibTex Copy to Clipboard
You can now simply right click on a single or group of papers and copy the BibTeX to your clipboard. This was a much-requested feature that we are happy to get in your hands.
Search Improvements
We had some confusion on how to add multiple search terms. We have now included some of the operators as part of the spyglass. These search operators will always show up at the end of the query with the correct spacing so try it out when you feel like making better smart lists!
Metadata Improvements
We got several requests that the metadata fields were not in an order that was easy to edit the most important fields. We will take more suggestions for this order in the future. As of this update, you will see Journal article titles are now at the top followed by authors, Journal name, and then unique metadata fields like DOI, PMID, etc. We have moved most of the titles up for most of the reference types so this should make editing the most common fields much easier.
Enhanced PDF Search
While you always had full-text search while you had the PDF open, however, we felt there was an improvement to help find the relevant terms you were looking for. Introducing our enhanced search. While having the PDF open simply click ctrl + f(CMD + F on Mac) and you will get a new search pane. This search pane will show you a snippet of the word surrounded by the text it’s around. Click on any of the references and the page will jump automatically to its location and be highlighted. What’s that you say? You want it on the preview window as well? Done and done.
Proxy Text
We’ve updated our proxy text to be a little easier to understand. The old way showed you a proxy login even if you didn’t have a proxy setup. We now will gray out the proxy option if no proxy is detected and changed the default to go to the article page.
Our release today is a few things that were done and tested so we released to make things easier on your organizing and reference management.
First up is Preview Annotations. Last release we introduced the preview pane. This release we expanded on that by allowing you to preview your annotations in the window. This is still a read only view but it should make it easier to see your annotations quickly without opening the full PDF.
We have added the Date Modified field. This field is updated anytime you add, update, or remove an annotation by yourself or on a shared library.
Citekey Search is also present in this release. You can search a citekey using citekey:some.Key. Search with citekeys that contain a “:” might give some funky results so we suggest you regenerate your citekeys so that they use a period by default.
Next up some optimizations to search. You are now able to drag and drop any reference you want into a lists directly. This works with recommendations as well.
Search also got some love of saved searches. The search bar will remember the same search you previously typed. We are still working to expand on this but for now if you have a completed query no need to retype it each time you open a PDF and want to come back to search after.
Last up is the the Enhanced PDF got a new view. We added double page view a few releases ago but for some researchers they noticed that the paper had a cover page or they were reading a book and wanted a more intuitive experience. Introducing “Double Page (Left Even)”. This setting will set the first page as a singular page and then change to even pages to all be on the left hand side.
Double Page (Left Odd) works best for regular research articles but can be switched to at any time. We hope you enjoy this new feature.
Quick release to fix a few issues!
We also have added some additional PDF features to make the reading easier. First up is rotate all pages. If you import a PDF where all the pages are the wrong way.
We also combined the power of the extension with the web reader. The short of this means that now the View PDF buttons should show up more and give you more information about where you get access for something. It also means you will have a more access to Open Access content right from the reader. So whether you are looking for the references or if you are looking at related papers we will try even harder to get you access to the full text on the fly!
We hope everyone is keeping safe during this time. If you are working on any research or development that has to do with COVID-19(Scientist, Researcher, Doctor, Journalist, etc.) we have a new resource for you to use. Please head to https://covid19.readcube.com/about to register for the COVID-19 Research Pass. The pass currently hosts over 26 million articles from leading publishers such as Springer Nature, Wiley, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We hope this resource helps anyone who is trying to find solutions to difficult problems during this difficult time.
For the desktop release, we have a few items which you hope make research easier. Before we start we overhauled our underlying network layer. While not very eye-grabbing as far as a feature this should allow our desktop app to work in more enterprise environments. VPN? Check. Corporate Firewall? Check. Custom Certificates? Check. Underwater Research Facility with Satellite Internet? We weren’t able to check but let us know so we can add it to our checklist. We also improved performance for bigger libraries!
First up is the new Paper Preview option. You can access this by clicking on the Eye in the bottom right corner. This is a watered-down preview of the PDF document. No annotations will show up but you can copy some text if you need it for somewhere else quickly.
PDF Preview can be disabled by clicking on the Eye again.
Another highly requested feature was getting the notes column. You can now see this by right-clicking on the top bar and clicking Notes.
Citekeys are here! Well, to be clear they were always here but now you can generate them for your whole library. If you go to file management(now renamed Paper Settings) you will see an option for Citekey Management. We also moved “Watch Folders” to a new tab. This is a desktop-only feature!
Citekey management will start disabled but you can enable it and select how you want your citekeys used.
When importing items into your library you can choose to use the citekey that the item came with or choose to overwrite the citekey with the options you specified. You can also choose to regenerate all the citekeys in your library or if you are happy with your current citekeys you can generate only missing ones. You can currently only generate citekeys for your library but we will be adding support for shared libraries in the future.
We also made some changes to the language used in the right-click menu. Instead of “Metadata”, we changed this to details. We have found that more and more people are importing other PDFs besides scholarly literature and were getting hung up on the “Metadata” part of this. “Details” actions are the same but more agnostic as to the reference you are editing. We also changed “Manually Resolve” to “Lookup Details” to help with our transition to supporting finding information on more types of literature.
If you were confused about what type of annotation you had on the notes menu before, fear not! as we tell you with an icon so you can easily distinguish between highlights, underlines, or a strike-through.
You can also now click on any of your notes or annotations and it will automatically open the PDF in question and scroll to the annotation for you! Once the PDF is open you can annotate or switch to our inverted theme like normal.
Did I say inverted theme? I did! Our brand new inverted theme is here! Easier on the eyes and synced between all your tabs. To switch just click on the dark theme icon at the top to choose this new theme.
- On the recommendations tab, you can now select a shared library/list. These items when imported will still go into your personal library but we are working on a workflow to allow you to select a library/list for this as well.
- We fixed some issues with ris / bibtex import.
- Preview pane was removed for some accidentally. It has been added back in.
- Tags no longer get a # sign when imported.
