What is reference management? Why Paperpile?

Anyone who regularly reads, writes, or works with research papers or other academic literature faces some of these common challenges:

You’re writing a paper and need to add citations and a bibliography in a specific citation style required by your professor or an academic journal. Citation rules can be complex, making it difficult to get them right or to change them when submitting to a different journal.
You find an interesting paper online, but later forget about it.
You save lots of articles to your computer, and suddenly, there are thousands of PDFs cluttering a folder. When you need a specific paper right now, it's nowhere to be found.
While reading an article, you come across a section you want to remember and jot down some notes, but you don’t have a central place to store them. They end up scattered and eventually get lost.
You’re collaborating with colleagues and need to curate a list of papers for a project, manuscript, or a comprehensive literature repository for your research group. Instead of streamlining the process, you waste time sending articles via email or setting up systems that are too complicated and get abandoned.

Whether you're an undergraduate, graduate student, postdoc, professor, or working in industry research, this sounds all too familiar.

This is where a reference manager comes in. Paperpile addresses these challenges with a simple, intuitive web app that offers a complete workflow.

Paperpile makes it easy to…

🔍 Import references directly from many academic databases like Google Scholar, PubMed, and ArXiv via the Chrome extension and Paperpile buttons
📎 Save supplementary files to your references

🧾 Cite references while you write in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and LaTeX