papers

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

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.

Get started

pip install papers-cli
papers add mypaper.pdf --rename --copy --bibtex papers.bib --filesdir files

• Installation — pip install and external dependencies.
• Quickstart — extract metadata, add a PDF, list entries.
• Adding entries — from PDFs, DOIs, bibtex, or whole directories.
• Configuration and install — make your bibtex and files directory persistent.

Guides

• Adding entries
• Listing and searching
• Renaming files and keys
• Configuration and install
• Managing your library
• Git integration
• Undo and redo

About

• Features
• Comparison with other tools

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.