The winner is…
Having comprehensively used these apps, it has become apparent that there is a clear outstanding app for PDF Management – PDF Expert.
PDF Expert is recommended as the best PDF management apps for healthcare professionals for a number of reasons:
- It is essential to have an app that can manage your files/folders, to ensure import/export is straightforward and easy
- PDF Expert offers a wide range of annotation options and is marginally better overall than GoodReader due to its ability to manipulate PDFs by adding/rearranging pages which GoodReader cannot do. The ease of use whilst marking up PDFs is unsurpassed.
- Ability to sync over the air to a wide range of common cloud storage providers such as Dropbox
- PDF Expert could also be used to successfully manage a medical literature library without problems. Whilst there is no inbuilt search engines, the overall control and functionality of a medical library can be managed on PDF expert without encountering many problems.
It should be noted that both Sente and Papers make managing large medical literature libraries substantially easier as they both contain databases that allow you to search for articles via numerous criteria. Out of these two, I would suggest that Sente is better for power users who actively work with and manage a significant academic medical library (such as clinical researchers) due to its advanced feature set.
However, Papers is easier to use and is more than suitable enough for the average physician. It is quicker and easier to search for and download academic articles using Papers rather than Sente and the annotation features are sufficient. Dropbox integration and the straightforward ability to share articles and references mean that Papers is still recommended as the primary medical literature library management app. As a result, and if possible, I would also purchase Papers in combination with PDF Expert to ensure that you are maximizing the potential of your iPad.
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Thanks for this review – very interesting, and it will be helpful to me as we decide which PDF manager(s) to incorporate as export options in the next release of our PubMed search app (www.pubsavvy.com). A couple of observations – most users of medical literature need to manage citations as well as pdfs (to create bibliographic listings, etc). While Sente and Papers sound impressive, I’m not sure I’m seeing something yet that will replace my use of EndNote on the desktop (perhaps I am just being timid). I wonder when apps will come for Zotero and Mendeley…
Using Dropbox to manage PDF libraries will be tempting for a lot of people, but seems like it won’t work that well unless you have an ironclad naming convention to prevent storing lots of duplicates. Now when you download from journals, they all have their own file naming system, which is pretty annoying – especially if you don’t also have the standardized citation information attached to the pdf as metadata, or by bringing it in to a reference manager program that has the full citation. PubMed ID is nice for de-duping, and of course that’s what we use in PubSavvy since we are dealing only with that source, but once you get into managing articles from multiple sources you face a whole other host of issues. Looking forward to checking out your recommendations.
Great review! Exactly what I needed. I will certainly come back to your site…Many thanks!
Stephan
Thanks for this review – very interesting, and it will be helpful to me as we decide which PDF managers to incorporate as export options in the next release of our PubMed search app (PubSavvy). A couple of observations – most users of medical literature need to manage citations as well as pdfs (to create bibliographic listings, etc). While Sente and Papers sound impressive, I’m not sure I’m seeing something yet that will replace my use of EndNote on the desktop (perhaps I am just being timid). I wonder when apps will come for Zotero and Mendeley…
Using Dropbox to manage PDF libraries will be tempting for a lot of people, but seems like it won’t work that well unless you have an ironclad naming convention to prevent storing lots of duplicates. Now when you download from journals, they all have their own file naming system, which is pretty annoying – especially if you don’t also have the standardized citation information attached to the pdf as metadata, or by bringing it in to a reference manager program that has the full citation. PubMed ID is nice for de-duping, and of course that’s what we use in PubSavvy since we are dealing only with that source, but once you get into managing articles from multiple sources you face a whole other host of issues. Looking forward to checking out your recommendations.