Papers Support Forum

You can always write your tag words in notes section. In that way when you search in notes section, you can see all papers with that keyword (or tag)

Sorry if I have missed something, but I agree with Yogesh9ic that what is being requested here sounds a lot like the already present keyword functionality (accessible from the Notes pane next to the Info view). fercook - keywords are in fact distinct from notes, although they both are accessible thorugh the Notes view. The Keywords section is located right above the Notes area.

That said, the keyword management in Papers is currently quite limited. There is no convenient way to see all existing tags in order to organise/merge/standardise them for example. However, I think the Papers team is fully aware of this and it is quite probable that the functionality will be improved in some future release (though I do not know how high it is in the list of priorities).

Ideally, tags would be a feature distinct than keywords for the following reasons:
- Keywords are automatically filled when importing papers, therefore interfering with tags; obviously, one can use a prefix, such tags:RNA, to make them searchable, but this would be tedious;
- I agree with fercook, Things has a nice tagging system. For tags to work, it should be easy (as in fast) to add them. I find adding keywords a tedious process: select notes, type keywords, save. The keyboard shortcuts in Things make tagging easy (fast);
- It would be nice to have a tag view (a new entry underneath Journals in the left pane), just like browsing by Authors or by Journals, where you would see the list of tags with the number of papers associtated with it. Just like with the Authors view, one could merge tags: say you not very consistent when entering tags and you have 'Algorithm' and 'Algorithms', you could merge the two tags into a single one, say 'Algorithm'.
- It would be fantastic if the tags were saved in the metadata of the PDF file in order to take advantage of the tags outside of Papers

Just my $ 0.02 CDN
M.

I also want tags. Collections are a good first hack at tagging since you can put a paper in multiple collections. I use this extensively, but I now have so many collections that they're difficult to use:



I think collections would be much more usable if they were presented as a tag cloud, similar to Yep. Varying the font sizes would serve two very useful purposes: (1) emphasize larger collections, and (2) shrink the height of the collection list, since the long tail of small collections would take up much less space. And instead of creating a collection and then adding papers to it, it would be nicer to have new tags automatically appear in the tag cloud as the user adds tags to papers.

Last edited by danb (2009-05-12 12:33:08)

I also would like improved tagging and tag searching more than any other feature. 

I include in this, keyword filling during Match as well.  As a physicist, I usually
Scitation - http://scitation.aip.org/ - as my primary resource for searching for articles.  These
articles have keywords when I look them up via Scitation, but to use Match in Papers, I have
to use Google Scholar which does not have the keyword data -- at least it does not import
them.  Automatic import of keywords to be great.

Also, yes, entering keywords is tedious, and yes, searching via "Smart Searches" is really
inelegant.  The current interface's similarity to iTunes is nice for its short learning curve, but
it suffers from some of the same weakness.  Note that even iTunes supports tagging
multiple files at once, which AFAIK, is not possible in Papers.

Wow, great ideas!