Papers and UCL Library resources

Owned by Margaret Stone
Last updated: Jun 02, 2011Version comment
3 min read

Papers is software for Mac users.
It is a reference management tool, for collecting and organising references and full-text files of research papers and other publications.
PLEASE NOTE: the following instructions apply to Papers v1 only - we will endeavour to update for Papers v2 as soon as possible

Pre-requisites

  • Apple Mac computer with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or above - no version for other operating systems. Compatible app for iPhone and iPad also available.

Access outside UCL

Papers allows you to search various databases (called "Search engines" in Papers) for journal articles.

If you are on the UCL network, you will be able to search any of these for which we have a subscription (including JSTOR and Web of Science) without having to log in. This is because the databases recognise you as a UCL user (by your computer's IP address). However, if you want to use Scopus, or to access full text or search any databases from outside the UCL network, you'll need to make the following changes to Papers' set-up.

Scopus

The first time you try to search Scopus, a window will pop up, asking you to enter your Scopus Account ID. For UCL, enter the five-digit number 10182

You should then be able to search Scopus from within the UCL network. See below for off-site access.

Full information about the Scopus plugin is available on the Papers website at http://mekentosj.com/papers/help15/pgs/scopus.html

If you ever need to check that the ID is configured correctly, you can see it within Papers by going to
Preferences > Plugins > Search Engines > Scopus

Accessing journal articles from outside UCL

If you have saved references in your Papers library and want to open the full text from a Mac which is not on the UCL network, you can configure Papers to use UCL's proxy server, EZProxy.

  • Go to Preferences > Sources
  • In the Library Proxy field enter the text
    http://libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/login?url=%@

    (leave the Authentication URL field blank)

This will mean that when you go to "Open URL in Tab" or "Open URL in Browser" for a paper in your library, the link to the publisher's version will go through the library's proxy server and, provided we have a subscription, grant you access as if you were on-site.

Note: you may sometimes see an error message like the following, when opening URLs once you've set the Library Proxy field.

To allow http://www.some.url/page_location to be used in a starting point URL, your EZproxy administrator must first authorize
 the hostname of this URL in the config.txt file.
Within this database's section of config.txt, either the following line must be added:
   Host www.some.url
or, alternatively, a RedirectSafe <http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/ezproxy/cfg/redirectsafe/> for this host or domain
 may be appropriate.
After editing config.txt, the EZproxy server must be restarted to make changes take effect.

The error message basically means that Papers is trying to open a link through the UCL proxy server which we have not set up to do so.

This means one of three things

1) It is a freely available resource which does not need to be proxied.
In this case, use the "reload without proxy" menu option in Papers, to get to the free page.

2) It is a subscription resource which we don't subscribe to.
In this case, reloading without proxy as in 1) will take you to the website, which may sometimes give you the option to pay for the content, if you want.

3) It is a subscription resource which we do subscribe to, but which we haven't set up proxying for.
If you believe that this is the case, let us know and we can update our proxy settings to allow access.

NB: If you connect to a PubMed record in this way, you can set up UCL as "your" library in the PubMed preferences (see instructions), to display UCL SFX buttons and see if we have a subscription to the journal.

Searching from outside UCL

EZProxy can also be used to enable you to search some databases ("Search engines" in Papers) from outside the UCL network.

  • Go to Preferences > Sources
  • In the Authentication URL field enter
    http://libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/login?url=http://isiknowledge.com

    and tick "Go to this page when Papers is started". Whenever you start Papers, you will be taken to the proxy server login screen, where you should login to ensure that a proxy server session is running before you try to search one of the databases.
  • On your Mac, go to home > Users > username > Library > Application Support > Papers > Plugins > Search Engines > search engine name, e.g. WOSSearchEngine.searchengine > Contents > Resources > gatewayurl.txt and change the URL there to include the proxy part at the end of the domain name, e.g. for Web of Science

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve

or for Scopus
http://services.elsevier.com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/EWSFEDSRFSearchWebSvc/FEDSRFSearchServiceV4