I see that the Paperpile Help briefly mentions these features aren’t available, but I’d like to put a vote in for them anyhow.
Searching within fields:
I constantly target the author, title, and journal fields. I love Paperpile’s Docs plugin, but it can be very difficult to track down a paper, which interrupts the flow of writing.
For instance, take the last name of an author I was trying to cite: “An”. Not remembering the title, which was peppered with common terms anyway, I was unable to get the paper to show up in the Docs plugin popup and had to go digging through my references to find it. The search results for this string weren’t meaningful without a way to specify what I was looking for and where, and this happens quite often while I’m trying to find a reference. Filtering authors by clicking their names is helpful in certain circumstances but not in most, I’ve found.
Search operators:
I realize we can select multiple labels at once, which is helpful, but search operators, IMO, drastically increase the usefulness of search, especially within a large database (mine is pretty small, but even so). Just putting a vote in for this, as in most other respects Paperpile is the only reference manager I’ve actively enjoyed using. Fine-grained search would make it even better.
If there is anything I am missing or could do to target my searches more finely, though, I’m all ears.