PaperShip - Mendeley & Zotero App Reviews

Definitively it’s a great app, flawless design (way better than the zotero or mendeley app), good integredated pdf viewer with usefull anotation tools, great synchronisation with zotero, and easy citation or pdf sharing … but some important features are missing for me to give 5 stars. The main ones are the DOI which does not appear in the info panel (and then no direct link to launch safari through doi.org, which is really usefull) and it is not possible to select several items, which mean no multiple citation drag and drop to a single collection, or items merging. I would also like (even if I know it could be tricky) have a tool to export selected collection to a .bib file. Still a great app and looking forward to see what the improvement will be.

The app is looking nice as expect, but of very little integration. First of all, pdf documents alread downloaded in Mendley are shared with Papership. You have to add again any pdf you want manually. By adding a document youll notice that you have two files on computer instead of one. So, Papership is harddrive inefficient too.

It will be great if this app supports tabs for multiple articles.

The app looks very nice, but I’m finding it tends to crash a lot when I try to do only simple things like view paper metadata.

Opened app, didn’t sync properly with Zotero. Could not see folders or documents. DOn’t waste your money. Zotero app works better.

I have bought the app (not for a little price) because it seemed to be the best working bibliography reader to couple with mendeley. It worked half a week, now it won’t even open, appearently because of the use of APIs retired from Mendeley. Please fix it!!

I just synced 2750 Zotero citations. Next, I’ll be adding 4000 PDFs to Zotero and trying to retrieve the PDFs’ metadata. If all goes well, then I will have my anotated digital library and my citations in one place…for a one time cost of $10. Take that EndNote, Papers, and Sente! **suggestion: market this to more than just “scientists"…ahem, the humanities? I am in philosophy and I need this too**

It would be nice if the import actually worked. I can still get new articles through the zotero safari plug-in, but importing straight to this would be nice. Also am testing out the ipad version, but haven’t have a chance to really try it out yet. Will report back.

I was a long time die-hard Papers user, but was driven mad by their recent selling beta (which was indeed alpha) to users, and thus forced to find an alternative. I am glad to find PaperShip. It has so nice and clean interface, with powerful PDF note taking function (which I guess makes use of Mac/iOS native PDF tools), and synchronizes seamlessly between Mac and iOS through Mendeley (in my case), which is way much better than Papers’ buggy dropbox sync. It is a great start. I hope the authors will keep improving it and making regular maintenence.

This is a revised opinion following my earlier rating. Sorry, but honesty is required and it seems I was hasty in awarding 3 stars. After spending an entire day attempting to reliably synchronize with Zotero and Mendeley I gave up. What claims to be a good PDF annotator just simply does not live up even to this simple description. It is easier to open PDF’s in an external editor, annotate and save back to the Zotero library than this supposedly automated app which adds hours of frustration while detracting from real productive work. Not worth the money and headaches. I bought on the ratings but quite honestly don’t know what the rave is about. This app needs some serious reworking.

Much nicer interface than that of Zotero App for Mac but it still lacks some basic features (e.g., moving/copying a paper into a group collection) and has annoying bugs (e.g., not showing any papers in a new collection created in Zotero for no apparent reason). There’s also no user manual and the online “help” is very limited. $14.99 price tag is hefty for what you get. Worth revisiting when it’s more fully developed.

After years of using papers2 I made the swtch to menedely, but I haven’t been a big fan of it’s appearance. I downloaded Papership because I thought it would improve the appearance of mendeley and I wasn’t disappointed, but I was surprised by the lack of features. You cannot annotate the PDF’s in an external PDF view (like the iphone app can), search is sorely lacking, and papership did not import my subfolders which I do not want to spend time recreating. I would not recommend this application

No good way to move chunks of data around and reorganize. No adjustable settings whatsoever. There are free iPhone games with more features than this application. DO NOT BUY.

So I logged into Mendeley, was pleasantly surprised with how easy the sync was. Looking at the interface, found it decidedly nicer than the Mendeley App. After poking around for a bit, I decided to get down to work and pull up that paper I was planning to read. Except there’s no search functionality. Can’t search for new papers, can’t search for papers already in your library, meaning that this is NOT a standalone app. Quite disappointed. I hope there is at least an internal search added soon. Grad student beer fund wasted.