papers-cli 2.17

utilities to keep your PDF library organized

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.