And you always thought that “research” is only for those who wear lab coats and thick eyeglasses. We always go to the Web to get the fastest answers, and those who are looking for a robust way to keep tabs of all the research they’ve encountered on their quest for wisdom and information should take Papers seriously. It helps keeps notes and links nicely organized and easily found.

Papers is an app targeted at scientific and academic researchers; but it is also useful and helpful to anyone who does any kind of research. When you open Papers in landscape mode, the main menu will be shown to you. Beside it are the first pages of the things you have in your library. You can speedily look through those documents by swiping the screen.

If you tap the Library button on the menu, a list of all the article references in your library will be shown. What’s good about it is that the Information about the references includes a title, author, journal and rating. You can also rate articles as you add more documents, references and articles to your library. When you downloaded a PDF of an article linked to a reference, that information will be included, too.

You can quickly locate articles via the search bar at the top of citation list. Above that is the edit button. Click that and you can just simply delete articles. You can look at articles by author or by journal. More ways to view your references are seen at the bottom of the menu. Flagging lets you bring articles to the top of all the documents where you can easily access them.

It has FileSafes

A tool bar at the top is available in all views. When you click it, you’ll find tools for sharing articles and references. You have options to send them through email, share them directly on a network with other owners of the app or you can just simply export them to iBooks or Quickoffice.

Other tools let you bookmark a page or make a note about it and toggle between full and partial screen views. Bookmarks can also be added to the Papers app from within Apple’s Safari Web browser.

This app also gives other ways to protect your research from accidental deletion or corruption as it offers free backup to its servers. It will also synchronize information with a Mac running on your home network.

Why use Papers?

Papers is a slick way to handle on all kinds of research on the iPad. With its search features, you’ll never have to worry about finding that nettlesome fact you know you saw somewhere, and its bookmarking, highlighting and annotation tools ensure you’ll find the important parts of an article when you return to it. It makes the iPad a perfect companion for research.

It’s the Information Age. And because we live in this age, we’re almost always researching something. We always look for a certain place where we could keep our research materials and find them again easily. Papers will give you that place on the iPad.

Your thoughts

What do you think? Do you do a lot of research in the web? Have you already tried Papers? What did you experience? What do you like to share?

Let us all know in the comments!