Headline Feeds
Papers, an app from Mekentosj, is available for US$14.99 at the App Store.
Papers is a vertical app targeted at scientific and academic researchers, but it can be valuable to anyone doing any kind of research. It's especially valuable to researchers working across Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) platforms, since Mekentosj makes versions for not only the iPad, but also for the iPhone, iPod touch and Macs.
You'll also find the app useful if you work extensively with documents in the Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) PDF format and like to highlight passages, add notes to pages and share those PDFs with others.
View It Your Way
When you open Papers in landscape mode, you're taken to the main menu. Beside it are the first pages of the documents in your library. You can quickly browse those documents by swiping the screen.
If you tap the Library button on the menu, you'll see a list of all the article references in your library. Information displayed about the references includes a title, author, journal and rating. The software lets you rate articles connected to the references -- one to five stars -- as you add references and articles to your library. If you downloaded a PDF of an article connected to a reference, that information will be included with the menu item, too.
To find articles quickly, there's a search bar at the top of citation list. Above the search bar is an edit button. In edit mode you can delete articles and sort them by date, title or rating. You can also create new references from the menu.
Additional ways to view your references are available at the bottom of the menu. You take a gander at all flagged articles. Flagging lets you bring articles to the top of the heap where you can quickly access them. You can also look at articles by author or by journal.
What's more, you can find articles to add to your library with a journal search function. Six of the largest repositories of research on the Internet are included in the feature -- ACM, ADS, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Scholar, IEEE Xplore JSTOR, PubMed and Web of Science.
Failsafes Included
When you tap an article in a menu, all the metadata about it appears in a bar on the left side of the screen. If there's a PDF of the article in your library, its pages will appear beside the bar. To move through the article's pages, you swipe the screen. Double tapping an area in the article enlarges it. Double tapping it again brings it down to its original size.
A tool bar at the top of the screen is available in all views. There you'll find tools for sharing articles and references. You can email them, share them directly on a network with other owners of the app or export them to other programs like iBooks or Quickoffice.
There's also a tool for moving articles to collections. Collections are a way to organize your articles within Papers. You could have a collection on cyberwarfare articles, for example, or another on wireless antennas.
Other tools let you bookmark pages in an article, make a note about it and toggle between full and partial screen views. Bookmarks can also be added to Papers from within Apple's Safari Web browser.
Within articles, you can highlight passages, as well as add notes to pages. Notes appear as pushpins on a page. Tap the pin and the note appears.
Papers also offers a couple of ways to protect your research from accidental destruction. It offers free backup to its servers in the cloud. It will also synchronize information with a Mac running on a home network.
Papers is a slick way to handle on all kinds of research on the iPad. With its search features, you'll never have to worry about finding that nettlesome fact you know you saw somewhere, and its bookmarking, highlighting and annotation tools ensure you'll find the important parts of an article when you return to it. It makes the iPad a perfect companion for research.
