Are you a student or working in academia? Do you have to tackle loads of research papers? The Internet is full of tools that try to make this arduous task somewhat easier, and Paperpile is the newest addition to the gang. If you’re hooked on Mendeley, Zotero or ReadCube, don’t look now, but a better and slicker solution could be just around the corner.
Paperpile is a reference manager that resides entirely on the Web. There’s nothing to download except a Chrome add-on, and no account is needed aside from your existing Google account. Unlike reference managers that charge you extra to cloud-host your PDF files, Paperpile makes use of cloud storage you already have—Google Drive—and with 15GB of free storage, you won’t run out of space quickly. This means that once you upload your PDFs to Google Drive via Paperpile, you can access them from anywhere. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
To start using Paperpile, you first need to add some papers. Do this by adding PDF files you already have, searching for papers on the Web, or importing your library from your current manager. You can also add papers directly from search results on websites such as Google Scholar or PubMed.
Paperpile analyzes your papers and acquires all the necessary metadata by itself. When it can’t find it, it’s easy to manually add it on your own. When you find a new paper online and add it, Paperpile will automatically download the PDF for you, and all your PDFs can be synced to Google Drive with one click. Paperpile supports folders, subfolders and labels, and organizing your papers into them is a matter of dragging and dropping.
Paerpile makes it easy to organize and view papers, without overly complicating the process.
Going through your library is a breeze. The search function is instant, and the abundance of filtering options makes it easy to view papers by certain authors or from certain journals and sort them any way you want. For better organization, you can add notes to your papers or star them for even quicker access. All this browsing and editing is easily done with your mouse or using keyboard shortcuts.
Paperpile makes it unbelievably easy to view PDFs from your library, copy citations (simply mark one or more articles and press Ctrl+C), view who cited an article, and share articles with colleagues or friends. You can also set up shared folders to collaborate on a reference list with others, even if they don’t use Paperpile themselves—great for journal clubs and lab meetings.
Click “insert citation” in a Google Doc and start typing to locate articles from your library or the Web.
All this, however, is just scratching the surface of what Paperpile can do. Remember the Google Drive integration I mentioned earlier? It's not just for cloud storage—you can also use it to write and collaborate on manuscripts, papers, or even your entire thesis. The Google Drive plugin (which you will need to authorize separately the first time you use it) lets you add citations of any format to a document you’re working on. These can come from your library or the Web—simply type in some keywords and pick the right result from the list. The bibliography will be automatically added to the bottom of the document and will adhere to your chosen citation style. You can change this style at any time and have Paperpile re-format accordingly.
Sounds too good to be true? It did to me too, but except for a very minor and rare glitch in adding notes to articles, the only issue I encountered happened when I was signed into two Google accounts at the same time. Logging out of both and signing in again to the one associated with Paperpile solved this completely, and the service’s help files are thorough, clear, and pretty much solve any problem that may arise.
Paperpile is not free—you will have to pay $2.99/month after the first 30 days—but once you try it, you won’t mind one bit. There are enough hardships in academic life without having to fight with references and citations, and Paperpile is the first service I’ve used that makes this truly painless. In future updates, Paperpile plans to add its own PDF annotation tools as well as better support for tablets and phones. When that happens, the service will be indespensible.
Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Metro: Last Light $60.00 Metro: Last Light is a flawed game with genuine pathos, a unique first-person shooter that accomplishes more with its narrative than some films.Following in the footsteps of 2010’s Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light improves upon the gameplay of its predecessor without destroying what made the series great in the first place: the setting. Last Light takes you back to the post-apocalyptic Russian wasteland, employing an excellent soundtrack and bleak, desolate imagery to deliver a first-person shooter with surprising pathos and one of the most genuine game narratives in recent memory. Boot up Last Light and you'll be dropped into the boots of Artyom–a man haunted by memories of his mother, or lack thereof–as he attempts to leave the Russian Metro to capture “a dark one”, monstrous remnants of the world before it was devastated by all-out nuclear war. Of course, nothing goes smoothly for Artyom, and along the way you'll be captured by other survivors and work together with another captive, Pavel, to orchestrate an escape. Arytom's quest ranges across the Russian wasteland, ultimately leading you through areas devastated by nuclear destruction and nests of enemies mutated by the apocalypse before culminating in one of the coolest and most intense firefight finales I've ever experienced. 
In Last Light you'll leave the underground Metro to explore the desolate surface, and you'll need to carefully shield yourself from the fallout if you want to survive long up here. But frenetic, fast-paced combat is tiresome without a meaningful reason to fight, and Metro: Last Light tells a meaningful story through emotionally-charged flashbacks to the moment the nuclear missiles struck, and how that moment affected the Russian people. It’s a series of powerful scenes scattered throughout the 9-12 hour campaign that don’t force themselves on you, allowing different players to experience as much–or as little–of the narrative as they like. That’s one of Metro’s greatest strengths: it doesn’t force anything on the player. There’s plenty of optional areas to explore at your leisure, allowing you to intuitively control how long you spend in Metro: Last Light's bleak alternate reality. Moment to moment, the actions you're taking in Metro: Last Light are very similar to those you performed in Metro 2033: exploring, scrounging, and fighting for your life with a hodgepodge of unique and innovative post-apocalyptic weapons. Even your weapons tell a story, like the handmade submachine gun that has a magazine that slides left-to-right, through the weapon, as shots are fired. It’s a little thing, but idiosyncratic touches like this do an excellent job of showcasing the unique, alien nature of Metro's alternate reality Russia. Of course, those crazy cobbled-together weapons can be customized to fit your tactical preferences using Military-Grade ammunition, high-quality bullets manufactured before the apocalypse and now used in Metro as a form of currency. Paying a gunsmith to modify your armament with a silencer, lasersight, stock or foregrip is a simple way to significantly change the characteristics of each weapon, allowing you to tailor the game to your liking. 
The soldiers of Metro rely on an assortment of pre-apocalyptic firearms and improvised weaponry to defend their territory. Your limited inventory also forces you to make some meaningful tactical decisions: mod a semi-automatic pistol to be fully automatic and pair it with extended clips, for example, and you can use your new pistol to replace the submachine gun in your inventory. That in turn allows you to drop (or sell) the SMG, using the newly-opened space in your three-slot inventory for a long-range tool like the rifle. It's a seemingly small decision that could mean the difference between living and dying when you're exploring the wasteland on your own. Metro’s score is one of the best in the business and continues to establish not only the singular tone for any particular moment within the game, but a consistent and omnipresent theme throughout the entire narrative experience. Pair this with the spot-on sound effects–terrifying gunfire, wet gurgling screams, the frantic cries of communication between both enemies and the occasional comrade–and you’ll a sense of aural immersion to rival that of any great blockbuster war flick. The sound design remains exceptional throughout the game, tbough there’s a bit of weirdness with characters occasionally acting out of sync with their audio. 
Play Metro: Last Light on a powerful gaming PC with a good set of speakers if you can–you'll be amazed at how engrossing the bleak landscape and stirring soundtrack can be. Unfortunately, for as strong as Metro: Last Light is, it suffers from a myriad of bugs and issues that can often disrupt the atmosphere it works so hard to evoke. Crashes to the desktop and random minimization happen all too frequently, destroying any sense of pacing that you might have. Occasional hard locks and freezes join the list of serious technical problems, but by far the most frustrating bug I came across was the seemingly random times that the player would become immobile and unresponsive, regardless of whether I was using the keyboard or the gamepad. It usually happens when both the protagonist and an enemy–especially the mutated creatures–make a melee attack at the same time, causing Artyom to become unresponsive, almost as if stunned. Bugs aside, Metro: Last Light still isn’t for everyone. It suffers from a lack of direction that often left me backtracking and searching the same areas multiple times before figuring out what to do or where to go. Some may find this lack of guidance charming, but it feels like even the most simple of navigational suggestions are absent and the experience suffers for it. But the main challenge of Metro: Last Light isn't just poor directions–the game is hard. The two difficulty settings, Normal and Ranger (a special, harder difficulty setting that was made available as DLC to players who pre-ordered the game) are a perfect balance of what you want in a game like Metro. I can't speak to Ranger mode, but Normal is just hard enough that it forces you to slow down and think tactically in situations where, in other first-person shooters, you’d normally just run through guns blazing. That kind of recklessness will get you killed immediately in Last Light. Despite its technical flaws and poor guidance, Metro: Last Light is a uniquely challenging and heartfelt experience, a bleak first-person shooter that does more with its narrative that some films. It works well as an isolated experience too, making it a great entry point into the Metro series.