I’m only a few hours into my 150h trial, but I can already tell that DevonThink is more powerful than Papers for what I’m likely to need. So my question becomes: is there any reason to keep using Papers? My usage scenario:
I import the PDFs into Papers, then name/author/date them (allowing Papers to handle renaming the file for me, so I have logical filenames that are application agnostic). Eventually, I get around to tagging the PDFs, starring them, and so on.
Seems to me that aside from Papers’ robust ability to rename a file (I’ve not figured out how to get Devonthink to name files as “author, year- title.pdf”) there’s not a good reason tos tick with it. I don’t use it to search for the PDFs online (perhaps I should), and any renaming in Devonthink breaks the link in Papers to the file (easy to fix, but for 2k PDFs, it’ll get old after a while). Papers 2 is not as stable for me as I’d like, nor as fast as fast as Devonthink, and lacks the robust search abilities of Devonthink, etc.
I know I can Index (which is what I’m doing right now), but the ease with which I can highlight the PDF title and set it as the filename in DTP is far superior to Papers. It feels like I’m probably not using Papers as I ought to, so perhaps Devonthink will suffice as a standalone?
Lots of typing there, but here’s the “tl;dr” version: Why should anyone use Devonthink Pro AND Papers2? (This may be an easier way to get at what I’m asking than wading through what I typed above).
PS My usage setting is PhD dissertation, etc. I use Bookends as my reference manager.
I use both, and because they serve different purposes for me: DTPO is my text miner; Papers provides automatic organization and proxy accessibility.
For instance, when I want to do a lit search I do it within Papers2 via Google Scholar, Scopus, Pubmed, etc… I’m at home, but that doesn’t matter, because I told Papers2 the name of my university and so it has me sign in through a proxy and it’s as if I’m on campus, so I can download the papers in PDF form and use the ‘Match’ function to attach the correct metadata, when necessary. I stay in Papers to make notes and do highlighting, write my own synopses, and even use the new social networking tool they’ve built.
To do research, or generate new ideas, I go back into DTPO and index the Papers2 folder and start searching away. In addition, I’ll use DEVONagent toward the same end.
In the future, once I figure out a way to get the script to work, I will probably stop indexing full papers and either directly index abstracts from DTPO or export them from the Papers2 metadata.
OK, that’s helpful. Still, I’m confused on one point: how do you reindex the Papers2 folder, without all the files being imported again? Ideally, I’d like to tell DTP to scan the “files” folder and know that it will only index new/renamed items. When I tried that today, it indexed all 2,000 files again (though perhaps I did it wrong).
Did you click on “Index” or “Update Indexed Items” in the menu? You want to click the latter, and it only seems to work if your highlighting the folder that you want to update at the time you click it.
Yeah, I had “Index” checked. I’ll try “Update” later today. Thanks for the pointer about selecting the folder too. I’ll edit this post once I get it done.
Alas, it didn’t work as I’d hoped. I’d moved a large number of PDFs to other databases, and it just added all of them back to the Inbox. Looks like this is not a surefire way of just adding new files (or I did it wrong).
