bibcure VS PaperTools

You don't normally need to enter metadata manually. You can import it using the publication's doi, arxiv etc. Then papis gives you an opportunity to review and update the metadata. The other functionality that papis provides is a quick search through titles, authors etc.

Of course much of that can be done with doi2bib [0], arxiv2bib [1], etc., which you can combine with the wonderful bibtool [2] to keep a clean bibtex file. That's what I use and the advantage of this over papis is that you can version control it.

That said papis has its use. It's less heavy than zotero, a bit less proprietary format (the info is stored in yaml files iirc) and it provides a layer over bibtex. If it had full text indexing and search I could see myself using it more.

[0] https://github.com/bibcure/bibcure

[1] https://nathangrigg.github.io/arxiv2bib/

[2] https://www.gerd-neugebauer.de/software/TeX/BibTool/en/

I've had similar struggles in the past. My solution at the time was a bib file quasi-managed by hand using JabRef. I would also periodically do some automatic updating using a script I wrote[0]. The script uses the NASA Astrophysics Data System to look for updates to papers (they cross-match arXiv preprints with the eventual publications) and updates the bibtex accordingly. It mostly worked, but there were some bugs (the last 10% takes 90% of the time).

I've since resorted to more hand-checking of references when I'm publishing a paper. Rreference management is tedious, but I've found that it is overall is a minor fraction of the time spent working on a paper. So it doesn't seem worth spending too much effort automating.

[0] https://github.com/privong/PaperTools/blob/main/bib_update.p...