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.
