Papers Software
2008, Volume 1, Number 1 40 One of the greatest things about my residency was the tremendous library. The C.S. O'Brien Library at the University of Iowa had a wonderful librarian (Trish Duffel) and access to almost every journal available. During my fellowship, I had the chance to benefit from an amazing library (the Mary and Edward Norton Li-brary) at Bascom Palmer. During those years, I col-lected a vast array of papers as part of research projects, journal clubs, and basic reading and learning materials. These materials quickly grew and became a bit of a bur-den in regards to storage, organization, and reference. In addition, there were many times when I would want to review a paper quickly on a certain subject that would benefit a patient. Unfortunately, more times than not, the paper would be at home in a filing cabinet while the patient would be sitting in front of me in the clinic. Another instance is that of traveling. When traveling, I would bring 5-10 papers to read. These would invaria-bly get lost, wrinkled, or take up space in my carry-on. Electronic journals with PDF files changed most of these problems and made collecting and reading articles much easier. The time spent finding and organizing pa-pers from various journals was eliminated. PDF files are digital images that are exact duplicates of the articles in journals. PDF articles can be downloaded from the web-sites of the journals. There are multiple free programs (Adobe Acrobat Viewer is the main one used) that al-low you to read the files on your computer. PDF files allow you to keep your entire library of reference arti-cles on your computer. This allows you to travel with your entire reference library. One of the major problems with PDF files is keeping them organized. This is not much of a problem if there are only a few articles. Once the collection grows be-yond a hundred or so articles, it becomes difficult to store them in an organized way. My system was to save the PDF with a title and journal. I would then organize and save them into various file folders according to their topic. This was burdensome in several ways. First, naming the file took time. Second, once you had several articles on a subject (such as AMD), it became just as difficult to search and find the article you were looking for. Recently, a solution has been created for the increased John Kitchens, MD 1* 1 Vitreoretinal Surgeon, Retina Associates of Kentucky, Lexington, KY * Corresponding Author & e-mail: jkitchens@gmail.com The purpose of this article is to review a new program called Papers that is designed to help organize, store, and reference Port-able Document Format (PDF) articles. Papers provides a unique file organization and management interface. Additionally, it interfaces with PubMed in a variety of ways to assist with searching and referencing articles. If you read or write articles fre-quently, then Papers is an invaluable software that can remedy many of the headaches associated with PDF files. Accepted for publication May 5, 2007 2008; 1:40-43 Available on the web at http://www.academic-ophthalmology.com The author(s) have no personal financial interest in any of the prod-ucts or technologies cited herein. Â 2008 The main screen of Papers. On the left hand side there is the source column. The top-center displays the catalog of your PDF files. The bottom-center shows a pre-view of the PDF file. The right hand column gives the im-ported PubMed information.