papers

Command-line tool to manage your bibliography (PDFs + BibTeX).

Disclaimer: This tool requires further development and testing, and might never be fully production-ready (contributors welcome).
That said, it is becoming useful :)

A light-weight, command-line bibliography management tool built like git, with a main command papers and a range of subcommands. It lets you:

Maintain a PDF library with appropriate, customisable file naming.
Maintain one or several BibTeX collections, linked to their PDFs.
Fetch metadata from the internet — enough PDF-parsing capability to pull metadata from crossref (by DOI or fulltext search) or google scholar.
Search and act on your library with a find/grep-inspired papers list (tag, edit, delete, rename, fetch, deduplicate).
Stay in control — plain BibTeX files, optional git tracking, and undo/redo for every change.

📖 Documentation

Full documentation lives at https://perrette.github.io/papers/:

Installation (incl. external dependencies)
Quickstart
Adding entries
Listing and searching
Renaming files and keys
Configuration and install
Also: managing your library, git integration, undo/redo, features

Install

pip install papers-cli

Note there is another project registered on PyPI as papers, hence papers-cli for command-line-interface. See the installation page for external dependencies.

Quickstart

# extract metadata from a PDF and add it to your library
papers add esd-4-11-2013.pdf --rename --copy --bibtex papers.bib --filesdir files

# list and search your library
papers list perrette scaling approach sea level

See the quickstart for a full walkthrough.

Consult inline help (papers --help, papers <command> --help) for more detailed documentation.

From the same author

A few other open-source tools I maintain.

Scientific writing & data

texmark — write scientific articles in Markdown and convert them to journal-ready LaTeX/PDF.
datamanifest — declarative, reproducible dataset management. (See also the datamanifest.toml format spec and the DataManifest.jl Julia port.)

Speech to Text (dictate) and Text to Speech (read-aloud) tools

scribe — speech-to-text dictation.
bard — text-to-speech reader.

Metadata

Release files for papers-cli 2.17.3

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for papers-cli 2.17.3
File	Size	Uploaded
papers_cli-2.17.3.tar.gz	13.9 MB	Oct 1, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for papers-cli 2.17.3
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
papers_cli-2.17.3-py3-none-any.whl 86.2 kB Oct 1, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 14.0 MB

Release files / papers_cli-2.17.3.tar.gz

Download URL	papers_cli-2.17.3.tar.gz
Size	13.9 MB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`f9ab36520f3330f8b84dac1f0d588be70bc103b727ccd11d4d0a9aa902b01329`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`ac669f229736527d0694cabd34c28fd3458edced88e9b249b46d1509e9d49abb`
Upload date	Oct 1, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/perrette/papers
Publishing commit: github.com/perrette/papers/tree/7999cf08232dd30a1acd83196023e069aaa3dd48

Workflow

Publishing configuration: github.com/perrette/papers/blob/7999cf08232dd30a1acd83196023e069aaa3dd48/.github/workflows/pypi.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/perrette/papers/actions/runs/36888408437/attempts/1

Artifact

Subject: papers_cli-2.17.3.tar.gz
SHA-256 checksum: f9ab36520f3330f8b84dac1f0d588be70bc103b727ccd11d4d0a9aa902b01329 Verifying attestations

Release files / papers_cli-2.17.3-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	papers_cli-2.17.3-py3-none-any.whl
Size	86.2 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`73ba13713cdff602f51a8947254f0a072887c6222b6233abf26ebbae740762c8`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`ce986927b0c027b2e1474485c880fafd65daf10832e1e2d55d7f450219c4c4b4`
Upload date	Oct 1, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

Provenance

Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/perrette/papers
Publishing commit: github.com/perrette/papers/tree/7999cf08232dd30a1acd83196023e069aaa3dd48

Workflow

Publishing configuration: github.com/perrette/papers/blob/7999cf08232dd30a1acd83196023e069aaa3dd48/.github/workflows/pypi.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/perrette/papers/actions/runs/36888408437/attempts/1

Artifact

Subject: papers_cli-2.17.3-py3-none-any.whl
SHA-256 checksum: 73ba13713cdff602f51a8947254f0a072887c6222b6233abf26ebbae740762c8 Verifying attestations