Papers Livfe
Papers Livfe

Your Papers Life, Live

A global library of research

Introducing Papers Livfe

Papers Livfe (pronounced as "life") turns the thousands of personal libraries of individual Papers users into one global library of research. It allows you to connect with other users, to share and discover new papers and to exchange ideas and collaborate with your peers.

Automatic Metadata (a.k.a. no more matching!)

The creation of Livfe started with the introduction of the match function in Papers 1. Unfortunately till this date most publishers do not put any metadata in their PDFs, forcing you to manually match a PDF to a repository entry to get all the information like title, author list, publication date etc. We figured that if we would connect all Papers users this would no longer have to be done by everybody but instead could be turned into a collaborative effort. If someone had already matched a PDF all other Papers users could benefit.

This is exactly what Livfe does for you, when you import a PDF it takes a fingerprint of the file and checks if it matches with a paper already present in Livfe. If so it will fetch all metadata for you, and there is no more need for manual matching. Even more, from that moment on Livfe will provide you with the most accurate metadata automatically when new updates become available. For example, if other users correct mistakes or manually edit the metadata of a paper. And similarly, if you edit a paper manually your changes contribute to better metadata quality that benefit other Papers users as well. Another example: say you imported a paper via Google Scholar, a low quality metadata source, then later when another Papers user imports the same paper via Pubmed, a much higher quality search engine, you will automatically get the much better metadata.

Besides PDF metadata, Livfe will also automatically provide you with journal metadata and beautiful cover art. All taken care of transparently, zero clicks required.

Collaborate and share with Livfe Collections

Discussions

Now that we have a system in place that connects Papers users, what could we do that really opens new possibilities? This is what Livfe is really about. Livfe allows new ways to collaborate and Livfe collections are a prime example of that.

Livfe collections are just like normal collections in that you can use them to organize your library by dragging papers into them. The main difference is that those papers become visible to all other members of the collection. You can invite any other Papers user to become a member of a collection you create, or you can make it free for anyone to join. Use Livfe collections to share interesting new articles with your colleagues, collaborators, institute or the world. The possibilities are endless.

The Livfe homepage features interesting Livfe collections that are open for anyone to join.

Organize and filter with Livfe Reviews

In a world where it becomes harder and harder to deal with the overwhelming amount of new literature that comes out every week, two problems become more and more apparent. First, how do I decide what to read and what not? Second, even after you have read a paper, how do I remember what it was all about as my library grows bigger and bigger? Livfe Reviews provides an answer to both.

Livfe reviews are small, 140 character, summaries that you write for the papers you've read. You could see them as your own mini-abstract of a paper, and that's exactly how they are presented in the inspector. It helps you capture this one-sentence that makes you remember the paper every time you see it. Was it good? Was it terrible? A new technique? Or a missing link? Livfe reviews allow you to write down that one thing that makes the paper stand out for you, in your personal library.

Homepage

Your tweet-like mini-review does not only help you organize your library though. It could also help others decide whether that paper is worth reading or not. What if you could see all the mini-reviews on a paper from other Papers users before you had to decide whether to spend the next 2 hours reading it? This is why your Livfe review by default will be shared with the Papers community, and for each paper in your library you can view the reviews that other users wrote. Each one adds its own little view on the paper, but together, each from a different angle, they help you decide whether the paper is of interest to you.

Browse the Livfe Homepage

The Livfe homepage is your personal view your world of research, where everything comes together. Browse new and upcoming papers in your research field, check what others are writing about them and add them to your library via a simple drag and drop. Check which papers are the most read by your peers and browse interesting Livfe collections for you to join. And because the Livfe homepage is continuously updated based on what you are reading it always has something interesting to discover.

Discussions

No strings attached

Livfe is not just another social networking service bolted on top of Papers, it is deeply integrated into the workflows of the program and most important, it functions completely transparent in the background. No need to sign up, no progress bars or waiting spinners, no problems when you're offline, it just works. Want to add a paper to a livfe collection while your on the plane? No problem, it will be automatically added when you connect back to the internet.

What is private stays private

We take privacy as our highest concern. Papers you mark a private will never be sent to Livfe, and some document types are marked as private by default. This is all built into the standard workflows of Papers to make sure that the program does the right thing when it comes to dealing with your sensitive documents.

Start exploring Livfe...

To start exploring Livfe just click the button below and you will be taken to the Livfe homepage. Remember that its content is based on the information you filled in the first time you started using Papers. You can adapt and further complete your personal information by clicking the "Update profile" link on the Livfe homepage.

Get Started