Do you do most of your academic work on a Chromebook, or using Google Documents? Do you tend to do most of your reading of scholarly documents in PDF format on your computer? Would you like to be able to annotate (highlight sections) of your PDFs as you read them? Then Paperpile might be the citation and PDF management software for you.

Paperpile is a Chrome browser-based citation management platform that integrates with your Google Drive (Docs, Forms, Sheets) account. It enables you to quickly grab PDFs from Google Scholar, PubMed and many other scholarly sites, add the metadata for the references to your library, organize your references, and create in-text citations and bibliographies in Google Docs.

Paperpile is one of only two citation management programs that you can use with Google Docs (the other is Zotero). Paperpile is the ONLY citation management program you can use with a Chromebook. However, it is NOT free. It will cost academic users $2.99 per month.

Watch the video below and see what you think! You can do a free trial for 30 days.

The following nice introduction to Paperpile is by Kate Lechtenberg, a doctoral student at the University of Iowa and a librarian. It is over 10 minutes long but really does a nice job of showing you the main features of Paperpile.

Lechtenberg, Kate. (2017). PaperPile Overview. YouTube. Accessed 6/30/20.