Public developer API

We made some progress building an internal API for our mobile apps and Word plugin. That allows us to implement those features mentioned here in this thread more easily.

It seems there is a big overlap in LaTeX users and users who would use an API. I think we will be able to cover most of the common use cases (“download a BibTeX file whenever something changes”) without a full-fledged public API.

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I was hoping to use a public API to synchronize papers between Paperpile and my reMarkable tablet.

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If you can find a way to sync with Google Drive it’s also synced with Paperpile. Maybe that’s an option?

Something like the Zotero plugins for Atom/VSCode and Jupyter Notebooks would be awesome.

A useful feature I’m looking for is getting a search box within the editor/Jupyter notebook, typing in author year title words and getting the citekey back.

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I believe a public API would dramatically increase the number of Paperpile users as they learn about it from desktop and cloud based document writing apps which will have integrated Paperpile. I’m sure apps like Overleaf and Manuscript would quickly make use of the API and many authors would realise how good Paperpile is and migrate over.

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or better yet JSON, but yes, this would be great. TIA

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Are there some news? I think an API would be really useful

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Seconded. Even just a way to get my latest BibTeX export would be extremely useful.

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+1million.
API would allow IFTTT and Zapier integration amongst others.

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Yes, an API enabling things like IFTTT integration would be great.

Is there any update on this? It’s been five years since this feature was requested, and in my mind it’s the missing feature that’s preventing Paperpile from being a truly great citation manager. It gets so tiring when writing a LaTeX article to click “export to bibtex” each time I add a new citation to a paper, download the file, and then move it to the proper directory and rename it.

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We are painfully aware that BibTeX workflows are not perfect and there is much room for improvement. But we see this independent of the topic of this post, i.e. a public developer API. We invested quite a bit in our Word plugin over the past years. Although it’s now released as “Word plugin” it is essentially a Desktop client that can sync your complete library to your desktop in the background.

From there, our goal is to transparently write BibTeX files that are always up-to-date and also allow you to create and insert Latex citations in a truly “cite while you write” manner.

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I’m a scientist and bioinformatician, and doing this manual is losing time. I’m using Pocket to mark papers as to_read, which uses IFTTT to add a task in Todoist. Then I have to manually add it to Paperpile and star it, which will lead it to being synced to my Remarkable e-reader. I hate manual parts and will automate anything, but Paperpile is still lacking any options for this it seems. I love paperpile and have been using (and converting others) for years, but at this point I may have to start searching for an alternative to fix this missing link in my workflow.

There are a lot of people with idle time this summer, can we make this a sprint of some kind? I love paperpile of but the lock in is making somethings stale and brittle. Would love to be able to search my library without exporting. It’s already a web interface we should be able to do this.

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1+ - How about this idea - Make PP as much of an open source platform as possible. For example, make the PP database format available. That might allow outsiders to create an API, among other things.

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Hi Stefan,

I wonder if there is an update on an API to fetch all of paperpile records as bibtex? I am using Zettlr note taking tool on my macbook but prefer to use years of collection in paperpile for citations.

Thanks,
Samir

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Yes, we should have something to share relatively soon related to automatic BibTeX export via an API endpoint.

In case anyone is interested here, we also have put together a short survey to better understand the LaTeX and BibTeX use cases of our users:

Just want to second the request for a public api. Looked at your survey and what you all have planned. Looks really nice, but it does limit the flexibility. An api allows workflow to be completely customizable and that’s something that I really have to piece together with paperpile right now. Integration with notion will be really nice because I can use their relational database to track my papers, but even their relational database is a little limited tbh

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Hello, We at Third Iron would love access to a Public API, so that we could integrate with our product, BrowZine and directly export papers to your platform as requested by our customers: https://thirdiron.com/

Please develop this and have a great day!

-Third Iron

Hi, still no further info about API? I would like to massively extract cite keys from paperpiles. Is there any way to do it in current version ?

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