Papers 3 ceased working for me and none of my attempts to revive it seemed to get it back to a state where I could export all the data successfully. Switching to a new library and exporting that seemed to work temporarily—now it is back to crashing right after starting. The archive it wrote was corrupt and could not be imported into a fresh Papers 3 install in a virtual machine.
I played around with the Bookends Demo in the last two days and like the functionality and stability. I understand that the import from Papers 3 relies on AppleScript which is not an option for me.
I opened the Papers 3 sqlite database with sqlitebrowser and it seems that I could extract most of the bibliographic data, and the filenames for article PDFs easily. Writing a Python script to generate for example a BibTeX file with extra fields like PDF, or even the groups I created should be not too hard. I presume one can find Python libs for other bibliographic formats too.
Questions:
- Has anyone seen software for processing the Papers 3 sqlite database directly?
- What is the best format to generate or workflow to follow to get papers with PDFs into Bookends? In other words, is there a text format where I can specify the PDF to attach to a bibliographic item? It seems from the documentation that BibTeX is a no go (Pubmed PMID are not parsed?).
Thanks,
A.