What do you dislike about ReadCube?
The software is missing key features that were present in Papers 2 and 3, making it much less competitive to other paper management programs such as Mendeley. I started using Papers 2 when I was in grad schol (~2013). It had everything that a researcher needed! Ability to download articles from journal websites; parse the metadata; store pdfs for each paper; find duplicate papers, journals, authors; add and modify journal abbreviations; easy ways to manage citekeys and create bibtex files for referencing. I was extremely satisfied with it back then. Few years after, Papers 3 was introduced. Earlier versions were not great with many key features missing and lots of bugs. But the software got eventually better, with many features listed above restored or fixed.
Papers ReadCube is a complete departure from the previous versions. Despite several years in production, the program still lacks the basic features that the earlier versions had! For example, it is not possible to find duplicate papers, journals, or authors. Modifying journal abbreviations for batches of papers cannot be done, one has to do that one paper at a time. Try doing this when you have ~10000 papers in your repository!
There is no easy way to collect papers for individual authors, other than searching for their names in the search field. What the developers do not realize is that many authors have the same last names and that finding their papers with a simple search does not help. Also, every now and then, one has to modify authors' names. In Papers 2 and 3, one could collect papers written by the same author together, which would automatically correct their name spellings. This feature no longer exists in Papers ReadCube.
Another huge issue is supporting special symbols in titles or author names. In Papers 2 and 3, those special symbols would be recognized and converted to the Latex math format, allowing for seemless conversion into the bibtex format. This is no longer the case: Papers ReadCube would simply include the special symbols in the bibtex files without converting into the Latex math format, which would break every Latex compilation.
I have found many complaints online with researchers requesting the features described above. However, it is clear that the developers are not listening to these requests. Papers ReadCube is an example of a software that is developed by programmers with complete disregard of their customer needs.
The only reason why I kept my subscription in the last two years is that I have a large papers database that would otherwise be difficult to port over. However, with the help of tools like Mendeley and JabRef I will soon be able to stop using Papers ReadCube for good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
