FTPro to Search Journal Citations - Some Thoughts

[Jeffrey Weimer]

Hello!

I am test driving FTPro to search in PDF journal articles. I want to note some of my initial findings for anyone so interested.

I am comparing FTPro to Papers. FWIW, I also use Mendeley. Its search engine is only useful to do a quick-and-dirty finding. I've also tested EndNote and generally found it too cumbersome (and way too costly for its feature set).

I did a test run on my library database. For this specific case, I did a search on the terms:

  --> Papers: all:chlorosilane AND all:glass

  --> FTPro: *chlorosilane, glass

Papers returns a set of 16 results with significance ranking. Interestingly, it does NOT find articles where the terms are in the titles (this is something I've asked about on the Papers support sight).

By comparison, FTPro returns 7-19 items in the "around one line" search and 75 in the broadest search (it has 0 items at "next to"). In the "around one line" search, it returns the article with the terms in the title. I can see immediately the phrase that uses the terms.

I would note one odd behavior. When I adjust the slider and redo the search for "around one line", I get different return results randomly. Sometimes I get 7 hits, sometimes I get 19 hits.

As a final note, I would add that I've compared DevonThinkPro as well. For my needs, I find FTPro to be cleaner in its UI, have a more intuitive approach to searching, and return more useful results.

Hope this helps anyone who is also comparing FTPro vs a dedicated citation manager (and vs DTP).

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JJW

[elvi...@gmail.com]

I have also some interesting absurd properties with Foxtro pro. Indexing two identical files (duplicates), one of them ranks higher, the other one ranks about 10 steps lower. I don't know what is happening. 

 
But, the proximity searches in Foxtrot are much cleaner than Devonthink. The slides are very useful too. 

[David Levy]

Hello

I also use FT Pro and DevonThink for managing a large store of journal articles. I find I need both.

FT Pro is the fastest, most accurate, most finely-specifiable way of searching. The filtering by age, file type, location, etc. allow some coarse adjustments that help. I wouldn't like to be without it. One other unique feature of FT Pro is that after a complex query, the internal viewer highlights different search elements by color. This is valuable because some search terms are, of necessity, very frequently found, but what one actually seeks is a different term which is infrequent. Using color allows me to find these quickly. As I noted, so far as I know this is unique and very useful.

DevonThink (Pro Office) is also very useful in two different ways. First, I do quite a bit of the management of the articles within DT, e.g. converting non-searchable PDFs to PDF, noticing those that are misfiled or duplicates, etc. Second, the more important feature is the see also functionality which works by word frequency comparisons. I find that this often finds papers that I would not have realised are related or would not have realised have relevant sections because I would not have searched on some words. This is invaluable in the early stages of researching a topic.

David.
—
David Levy
Department of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
—

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