Papers: word, ipad, and other stuff

I have been using Papers for something like an year now. I quite like the application, indeed. It is easy to use and rather powerful.

I use it to keep all the articles I read and study for work organised. This way the papers are in the very same directory and I can access them easily from the application in a similar way to what iTunes does for music. I can also add notes and stuff like that.

Papers is also able to perform searches on the web (e.g., using Google Scholar). Then, I can import the papers into the application and possibly categorise them with "groups", assign an "evaluation" (which is rather useful... for example it lets me save time with articles with promising title and abstract but deluding content; this way I don't read them again when looking for information to cite).

Papers (not the application ;) ) have metadata, which is also used for citations. Most of the times (well, not really... sometimes -- but this is not Papers fault as this comes from Scholar or badly formatted papers or whatever) the metadata is accurate and everything is fine.  Unfortunately sometimes (which is, once again unfortunately, most of the times) the metadata is not correct. The quickest way I found to fix this is "unmatching" the paper and then searching again selecting some relevant data from the Paper. The interface is very well done and it is easy to understand how it works. In this case, I usually end up with correct metadata ready to be included in a bibliography.

And here it comes the first weak spot of Papers. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the point of view), my group works with Word. As I am the youngest, I simply accept the decision. Consequently, we have to build the bibliography with Word.

Word has a nice bibliography management feature; but it is quite broken. Or I have not found how it works. Word has a built-in bibliographic database. Papers is able to "write" a new database (possibly making a backup of the old one). At this point, word is able to insert citations from the db to the current document. Word has a very limited array of bibliography styles and although more can be downloaded, I found that they do not work very well. Sometimes the generated bibliography is not formatted correctly and it is very hard to make it fit into the requested paper style. At some point I usually end up making it static and then do everything manually.
Perhaps, there are better ways to do it. I have not found them, unfortunately.

This is not necessarily Papers fault. But it is a serious problem. Perhaps I should try different approaches, like going through bibtex or something like that. I remember that when I used to work with latex the bibliography part was quite easy (as long as bibtex was used... when creating bibliographies manually it was a real PITA).

Another very nice feature Paper has is iphone/ipad synchronization. I often read papers on the ipad (and save forests) and that is nice. Essentially if I just remember to synchronize, I have my full library with me all the times. This is dramatically nice. I'm just looking forward for the ipad to allow directly printing files.

The problem is that Papers does not easily synchronise data between two macs. This is awful. Right now I work most of the times with my EEE netbook. However, I would like to have the library on the macpro always in sync with the MacBook Pro's. I read some post requesting the feature, but it seems it has not been added yet. This is a major drawback, especially considering that Mendeley automatically synchronises not only among macs, but among every computer and device (win PCs, Linux ones, android, iphone/ipad and macs).

One of these days I'll share my opinions on Mendeley as well.