Here’s a great little program I ran across recently and have been trying with much glee, Papers. The basic idea is one that’s probably occurred to most scientists with varying degrees of frequency. The problem is how to personally manage an ever growing knowledge-base of papers. Each day, not only does the sum total of scientific literature increase, but as a scientist the boundary of your own knowledge also gets extended. Frequently you run across new papers that are interesting. You’ve got to decide if it’s worth keeping an electronic copy and if so, how to put it in an accessible place. Many of us (myself included) break down and being manually categorizing papers and then renaming the files by some pneumonic that makes sense. Retrieving the papers then becomes the next challenge. Having a way to search through all those papers would be nice, but in the absence of anything I’ve often been forced back to the publisher’s website to use their search engine (or to a broad search engine such as google scholar). This really defeats the whole purpose. Why bother in the first place? And how about having a sortable list of papers, broken by subject with your own comments/rating/thoughts included?

A couple of Dutch biologists actually did something about it.