Managing > 10.000 entries with Paperpile?

Discussion
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#1

Hello, I am considering to recommend Paperpile for a bibliographic project of the place where I work. I like Paperpile’s speed and simplicity and it’s ability to work together and location-independent. One important question remains: Will Paperpile stay fast when managing more than 10.000 datasets? Does someone have experience using Paperpile for larger projects? Also, do you find what you need with it’s limited search capability? I would like to learn about your experiences.

Best wishes,
Martin

#2

Hi, Martin, I’ve got 11,518 papers in my database, most have the PDF attached. Using the PP desktop app, adding papers, and creating biblio (both google docs and Word) work just fine. I don’t notice any lag with any of the features.

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#3

re: searching - yes, that’s a severe limitation. Many people have been requesting improved search capabilities for years now. I really don’t know why PP hasn’t improved this, given the demand for it. When I’m adding a paper, finding the paper you want requires searching outside of PP

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#4

Dear Bruce,
thank you for your kind reply and addressing my concerns. It’s good to hear PP remains fast with high data volumes. I tried Citavi Web and it’s so slow that it really unusable. Even Zotero has a lag.
Having to search outside of PP is a bad flaw. How do you accomplish this, by exporting the data and using a custom made search engine?

#5

you can directly search google drive, or google scholar. That gets you access to the text of the papers. You can also search GS by author, year of pub, and journal.

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#6

Thank you, good idea, I did not know, this might be a remedy.

#7

9,153 papers; 7293 with pdfs. The web app takes a few seconds to load or search but otherwise pretty reasonably responsive.

While Pp is probably the best citation manager on the market today, search limitations are a long standing point of discussion on the forum.

However, it’s not an intractable limitation. My workaround for searching or editing PDFs on my mac is to install Google back up and sync (now google drive), and sync PP folder to my mac. That allows me to use spotlight to search. Caveat: Pp folder has to be mirrored rather than streamed for spotlight to index the files.

When I want to search or annotate, I hit command-space and type the author name and voila, I can open, read, or annotate any PDF in PP with my PDF editor of choice.

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#8

I have 12784 papers / 8026 pdfs… I have not experienced any issues related to speed in terms of searching for specific items. I don’t make much use of sub-folders, but just search for specific things in the main folder.

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#9

Martin, I have 12000 entries, most of which with PDFs. Everything work well. I índex my paperpile file in google drive in Devonthink, so I can search and do several other things using DT AI. I have the best of the two worlds.

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#10

Thank you, Jose, never heard about Devonthink and I would like to try. I don’t have a Mac, but maybe I will in the future.

#11

Hi,
I already have 50000+ docs, all pdf, Paperpile is quick in search, within a fe seconds I get results, I however remain in doubt if all the results have come, but even then it is working fine.
PP however keep in mind and do needful to improve search and view facilities.
Sati

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