Paperpile has been reviewed by PC World magazine (4th March 2014). Paperpile is a browser-based competitor to Mendeley. It integrates tightly with Google services such as Google Scholar and Google Drive, and can also slurp academic PDFs “directly from Google search results”. I’d be interested to hear if it works with JURN. Once the found PDFs are in your Google Drive cloud storage, it’s reported that…

“Paperpile analyzes your papers and acquires all the necessary metadata by itself.”

Sadly it’s only for the Chrome browser, not Firefox. At present it seems to be just a personal workflow aid, since there’s no collective exposure of the found content to a single public search box (as is offered by Mendeley’s “Search papers” search box).

Most papers will be downloaded at speed, because they “seem they might be worth looking at later”. Yet if Paperpile were able to measure re-open rates, view duration and frequency, and the actual level of citation in a person’s finished project or work, then that would be an interesting basis for a bumping algorithm that could help power the results ranking in a public searchable catalog. Especially if Paperpile could broadly match or align your research interests with those of similar Paperpile users, in combination with a more standard citation analysis, to give you a tailored search experience. Although in practice I guess there would be huge and possibly unwanted feedback amplification loops generated by that approach, as search results could veer heavily toward the latest fashionable topics. Doubtless Google has this nailed down already, and there’s probably a Trendy Search Topic Surge Controller employed somewhere in the Googleplex.