How can I handle academic articles on a Mac and in the cloud?

Life Technology
1

A pretty narrow topic, but I hope someone can provide suggestions: I’ve got plenty of academic journal articles (PDFs) downloaded on to my computer - what are good ways to manage them so I can use them on my computer, as well as in the cloud (on Windows computers, on my iPhone, and on the iPad that I’ll have sooner or later)?

Right now I’ve just got them in different folders on my hard drive, with those folders in SugarSync; I read the articles using Mac’s Preview, which I also use for annotations and highlighting.

I can read those PDFs on the Windows computer I’ve got at work (through SugarSync), but as far as I can tell there’s no free software for annotations in Windows.

Is there good software for organizing journal articles? Ideally something that could also handle the citations in various formats (I usually need MLA) - I also want something that will let me see my annotations on an iPhone and iPad, as well as add new annotations on those devices, and in Windows.

2

Steep order. iTunes and iBooks might solve the ubiquity issue and access issues, but marking up PDFs on different systems is something else. Will follow up… interested in what you learn.

3

Yeah, it’s the annotations that are causing trouble. SugarSync itself is already sort of taking care of the ubiquity, although it’s not exactly fast to get the file from SugarSync on to my iPhone. I also want to make sure that whatever system I use is compatible with the iPad - I don’t have one yet, but one of my main “practical” uses for it will be reading academic PDFs for research purposes, and for that I’ll want annotation and highlighting. At the moment I can only do that on my home computer, and I’d like to be more flexible in that regard.

I’ve already discovered that PDFs annotated in Preview become somewhat unstable - I’ve had no trouble opening them on other systems (so far), but sometimes annotations appear, and sometimes not; I’ve emailed them to other people who have been simply unable to open them.

This BoingBoing post…
boingboing.net/2011/03/21/my-ess … c-res.html
… suggests Papers as a program doing roughly what I want, and I’ll be looking into it, but I was (lazily!) wondering if anyone here could save me the research. Some commenters at that page recommend against Papers, instead suggesting Bibdesk, Mendeley, or Endnote.

4

Does Evernote do PDF annotations?

5

well you could get a professional PDF software like Adobe Acrobat X which is compatible to any system. iBooks on iPad is a great PDF reader, no need to get a paid app for that.

6

If you got Acrobat Pro for Windows, you could annotate on the PC and use the mac software on your Apple devices, I think Evernote is a much better way to store and sort than the Cloud. I’m a big fan of both Evernote and Dropbox. I’ve been spoilt as I’ve worked in the advertising industry for years and get Macs and Adobe software and never had to find workarounds… I know that macs are used in the academic world so there must be software available. How you had a look on the App Store?

EDIT. I see your main computer is PC, so no point looking at the App Store! Preview for Apple is as the name suggests built mainly for preview. It has issues with formatting from certain files and I would not trust it for annotation if using across different platforms. The only solid option is Acrobat (full version) and Evernote or Dropbox. As for the software you mentioned, Endnote looks good, but is there iPad/iPhone app version? There are loads of edit pdf apps out there but, would need some research to find best one.

7

Following up on this…

I’ve played around with PDFPen for annotations a bit. To be honest for annotations it’s no better than Preview for my purposes (Mac’s Preview is damn good). But PDFPen does OCR (optical character recognition), which has proven very useful on a few occasions. There’s an iPad app for it, but since I don’t have an iPad yet, I can’t speak to that. Additionally, PDFPen does allow syncing with iCloud, which will be great on my future iPad, less good on the Windows computer at work.

I only just clued in that I can add the PDFs to Evernote, and then read them from there. However, I cannot annotate them with Evernote; I need to open them with another program to do that. If a PDF has been annotated with Preview or PDFPenPro, the highlighting and underlining appears in the Evernote window, but added annotations do not - just a little symbol indicating they’re there, and I need to “open” the PDF with the relevant program to actually view them. Fortunately, annotations made in PDFPen work properly in Preview, and vice versa.

Now I’m trying to figure out where I want my academic PDFs - on my hard drive, synced with SugarSync, or in Evernote and then very easily available everywhere? But if I basically move them to Evernote, I’m going to screw myself on occasions when I can’t get online, whereas SugarSync does save local copies of whatever’s been synced. Basically Evernote seems a good way to collect them all, and it’s great for searching and organization, but I worry about trapping myself in a system without much flexibility - and a system that assumes a permanent online connection.

One lurking issue is bibliographies: I gather there’s software out there that makes this a piece of cake, so if I’ve got an article that I first submit to somewhere that wants MLA, and then to another that wants APA, I can change the bibliography with a click of the mouse, and needn’t spend hours messing around with it. I’ve never yet used such software, but I suspect having the PDFs “free” in my directory gives me more future flexibility.

EDIT: It also looks like I can’t annotate a PDF that’s in Evernote when I’m on my iPad: if I’m understanding this link…
support.evernote.com/link/porta … up-to-date
… correctly, on an iPad I’d be able to read an Evernote PDF that I’ve already annotated, but I wouldn’t be able to change it in any way. That’s a definite strike against the Evernote option.