Zotero

Have made the switch to Zotero (ditched Papers after many years). Reasonable transfer over (~500 papers) but quite some work to get all the categories set up as those were not done automatically. The latest Zotero is quite useable for me- the latest betas have integrated PDF reading so will be very much like classic Papers when that is final. Can host PDF library locally or in-cloud storage, or use the Zotero storage. Slightly different ways needed to work efficiently with it, but fine once the transition was made.

The Mac version (v5.0.93) can't scan your RTF papers if it finds diacritics or umlauts in the references! … Or in other words, the Mac version is useless. :–(

Zotero is continously updated and refined. In my book, this makes it the best and most reliable cross platform reference manager out there. In contrast to a reference manager like Endnote, this makes a difference in the long run - this means less unfortunate breaks after system and word processor updates. One feature, spearheaded by Zotero, is the brilliant integration with web browsers, which makes importing references and PDF’s from websites a breeze. Others features worth mentioning: Google docs integration, open source, smart folders, the tagging system. One feature I miss would be folder watching for automatic import of downloaded pdf’s. The only better alternative on the Mac would be Bookends, which is not cross platform.

Worth testing

Not perfect yet. Needs more work. Howver it remains quite useful for creating bibliographies form materials downloaded online. Works well with Safari, Scrivener,and Word as well as OpenOffice etc.

Version 5 is out