Papis is an extensible command-line document and bibliography manager. It provides a way to organise research papers, books and other publications without relying on a large desktop application.
Its command-line interface takes inspiration from Git, with individual commands for managing different aspects of a document library. Papis stores bibliographic metadata in human-readable YAML files alongside the documents they describe. This makes the underlying data accessible without requiring a proprietary database format.
The program is designed around a flexible workflow. Researchers can maintain multiple libraries, use existing tools to synchronise them between computers, and extend the application with Python scripts.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Add academic papers, books and other documents, with automatic retrieval of bibliographic metadata.
- Search references by author, title, tags and other stored fields.
- Retrieve publication information using identifiers such as DOIs and services including Crossref.
- Import existing bibliographies from BibTeX files and other reference managers.
- Export references to BibTeX and other formats for use with LaTeX and related writing tools.
- Open attached documents, edit metadata and manage records through dedicated command-line commands.
- Synchronise document libraries using existing tools such as Git, rsync or cloud storage services.
- Share libraries without requiring collaborators to register with a central reference management service.
- Configurable document selection interface with shortcuts for opening, editing and browsing entries.
- Local web application accessible through a browser using the papis serve command.
- Separate terminal interface through the papis-tui project.
- Integrations with editors including Vim, Neovim and Emacs.
- Extensible Python API for building custom scripts and bibliography workflows.
- Additional integrations for Zotero and other applications through the wider Papis ecosystem.
Website: github.com/papis/papis
Support:
Developer: Alejandro Gallo and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
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Related Software
| Terminal-Based Bibliography Tools | |
|---|---|
| coBib | Simple, console-based bibliography management tool |
| Rebiber | Replaces unofficial BibTeX references with official records |
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| bibiman | TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database |
| bibtex-tidy | Cleans, sorts and formats BibTeX bibliography files |
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| Gorae | Terminal-based library manager for PDF and EPUB collections |
| CiteBib | Generate a Bibtex or LaTeX bibliography |
| bibclean | BiBTeX and Scribe bibliography prettyprinter and syntax checker |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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