I recently hired a professional proofreader to go through my paper. It seems I did not explain Paperpile well enough to to them and the end result was that they made changes directly on the document rather than in the Paperpile references. Of course, this is a big problem for me because if I were to use Paperpile to reformat my references I would loose all of their changes. So I spoke with them about what went wrong to try to get feedback for the developers and here are some notes to try to help someone like them in the future.
Here is what they wrote:
“Yes, I can edit the stuff in PaperPile–I just couldn’t find it easily. When I click on a cite, I get taken to the full list, and then there’s no search function and it was taking me awhile to find the first couple of cites, so I thought I’d save time by just editing within the document… Lesson learned.”
A few thoughts on this:
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Directly editing a PaperPile citation should result in an error message or warning.
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When clicking on a citation it should take the user directly to that citation in the list of citations. They shouldn’t have to search for it.
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Perhaps offer a way for an editor or reviewer to simply flag citations as being problematic or leave a comment rather than editing them.
Also, they made the following comments about the errors that they fixed:
Some of the bibliographic problems are not really about ‘correcting’ the bib data, but about the formatting of it–for example, city doesn’t seem to be automatically entered, as it was missing from nearly every reference. And journals had the name of the publisher added, which is not normally in a reference, and certainly not in chicago style. Just something to watch out for in the future.
I think they are wrong. This is about data. The city isn’t entered because it is often missing when the metadata is pulled from Amazon.com, and I think the publisher is added incorrectly because Google ads it there. I believe PaperPile creates correct citations if it has correct data, but the quality of the data is pretty lousy and a big problem for a large bibliography.
The end result is that I now have a lot of work to do going through and trying to figure out what edits my editor made and I have to put them back into Paperpile manually myself. I think Paperpile has put a lot of thought into all of these questions already, but I think more work needs to be done if it is to really work as part of a professional workflow, especially when someone who hasn’t been working with Paperpile for a while comes in and collaborates on a paperpile formatted document.