papers is a lightweight command-line bibliography manager for researchers and other users who keep collections of academic PDFs alongside BibTeX data.
It’s designed to help organize document libraries, create and maintain BibTeX-compatible collections, link entries to attached files, and retrieve metadata from sources such as DOI records, Crossref, and Google Scholar when working from PDFs or identifiers.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Extracts bibliographic metadata from PDF files using DOI information, Crossref lookups, or Google Scholar searches.
- Adds entries from PDFs, DOI values, or existing BibTeX records into a managed bibliography.
- Renames and copies attached PDF files using configurable naming templates based on bibliographic fields.
- Lists and searches entries with keyword matching, field-specific filters, and multiple output formats.
- Supports tags for grouping and retrieving papers by topic.
- Includes duplicate detection and broken file checks to help keep libraries consistent.
- Can perform actions on matching entries such as editing, deleting, tagging, and metadata fetching.
- Offers global or local installation modes with persistent configuration for bibliography files and PDF directories.
Website: github.com/perrette/papers
Support:
Developer: Mahé Perrette
License: MIT License
papers is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Bibliography Tools | |
|---|---|
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| bibiman | TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database |
| Hayagriva | Rusty bibliography management |
| bibman (Haskell) | CLI/TUI bibliography manager |
| pubs | Bibliography on the command line |
| BibMan (Python) | TUI bibliography manager |
| Xapers | Personal journal article management system |
| Bibman (Perl) | Small console tool for managing BibTeX files |
| papers | Command-line tool to manage bibliography |
| CiteBib | Generate a Bibtex or LaTeX bibliography |
| bibclean | BiBTeX and Scribe bibliography prettyprinter and syntax checker |
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