Devonthink and Readcube Papers

Is there anyone out there using Readcube Papers (it is the new upgrade of Papers from mekentosj.com and the whole database is now in their cloud instead of locally) in combination with Devonthink? If yes, how is your workflow? Any good alternatives? The userinterface and features of Bibdesk appear to be much less overwhelming compared to Readcube Papers.

The Mac power users forum routinely has posts about citation management software. I find the old Papers3 better than the new version. I am currently testing Bookends locally and Mendeley for my group share.

For the old (native) Papers3 version, I’ve written a “Papers to DEVONthink” script that exports individual note files for all notes & highlight annotations (of all publications selected in your Papers 3 library) to DEVONthink. It also indexes the primary PDF in DT and can transfer many more properties. These exported annotation notes can form a good basis to work with them in DT.

That said, AFAIK the new Readcube Papers version doesn’t have the scripting API anymore but maybe there are/will be server-side hooks? ATM, only the Readcube Enterprise edition lists “API Access” as one of its features.

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@msteffens , does this script still function well? I’m looking for an easy way to export my items (PDFs and assciated annotations and metadata) to DT.

Which exact application & operation system versions are you using?

The script has been developed for Papers 3 and DT 2, on an older macOS. I’d gather that it should also work with DT 3. It will not work with the recent Readcube Papers version, though – that isn’t scriptable, it’s essentially an entirely new application written with a cross-platform framework and styled to look like the old (Mac-native) Mekentosj Papers v3 (sigh).

I haven’t tested it on a current macOS system. When testing yourself, it may be best to copy the plaintext script code from the .applescript file into a new Scripteditor window and compile it again.