Change UX language to reflect diversity of sources

I get that the software is called "paper"pile, but many of the items I store are also books, book chapters, theses, online sources, etc., so it is strange to have the interface language always refer to everything as “papers.” A bibliography with 9 books tells me that there are 9 “papers”… It would be good if this language could be fixed to better reflect the capabilities of the application as it handles much more than “papers.”

I remember well when we spent hours discussing this issue before we released the private beta in April 2013. I agree it’s not correct but we still don’t know of a better term. I don’t like ‘Reference’ which is too technical and is also not correct because you can acutally add a PDF which is not a reference but the document itself. We could probably could change to ‘item’ or ‘document’ which is pretty neutral.

Do you have any ideas?

Publication is another option, and the one that Mendeley uses, although that will technically be incorrect in some instances, such as manuscripts and conference papers. And don’t forget that people include films and multimedia items in their bibliographies, so documents might not always be accurate either. However, I feel that document or publication would still be better than papers as they capture a much larger range of items (and “item” sounds a little too vague). Another option is to be contextually aware, using papers when it is just journal articles, books when only books, and publications when mixed, etc. but that is probably more coding than you want to do… :smile:

Item sounds neutral and natural enough to me.