What if there was a citation manager that came with multiple benefits and was as easy to use as Google Docs itself? Today we are launching our free Paperpile add-on for Google Docs, which we think comes very close: A free, fully-featured citation manager for Google Docs Paperpile does not seek to replace Google Docs but rather to extend it and make it a first class platform for academic writing. As a startup, we occupy this space with others like ShareLatex, Overleaf, and Authorea which provide authoring platforms for academics. Fixing collaborative writing is a big part of this equation. Paperpile is about academic productivity. And of course, for the revisions we re-imported to Google Docs and started this tedious process all over again… Our solution The manuscript was then sent around via email, it could only be edited by one person at a time and it required many “manuscript_final3.docx” versions until final submission. While the writing was a truly collaborative experience, reference management was a one-person-job and team productivity was set back by many years! Citations and references were, frankly, a mess.Īt some point in this painful process, the document was exported to Word because some poor colleague had to use EndNote to compile all the references. Unfortunately this was not the case for academics. That was back in 2011 and by then Google Docs already had impressively solved the problem of collaborative writing. I was not alone, more than 10 others were writing at the same time in a Google Doc. I remember only too well editing the manuscript and supplementary text on a weekend right before the deadline for the paper submission of the ModENCODE project. With a background in genomics, I’ve personally been part of several big consortia. How do you write a paper with hundreds of authors in the first place? Even if only 10% of 200 authors of a paper actually take part in the writing there’s the not insignificant we are faced with the problem of 20 people editing the same document. However, we’re more interested in the practical aspects of this debate.
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