papis/papis

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1769 stars · 124 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Papis is a powerful and highly extensible command-line document and bibliography manager for organizing books, papers, and citations. It stores metadata in human-readable YAML files, supports BibTeX import/export, and can be extended with Python scripts and editor plugins.

Use cases

• manage a personal library of academic papers from the command line
• fetch paper metadata automatically from a DOI when adding a PDF
• export my bibliography to BibTeX for LaTeX documents
• import my library from Zotero or Mendeley
• search my document library by author, title, or tags
• sync my reference library across machines without proprietary services
• integrate citation management into vim or emacs

When to choose

• you prefer a CLI-first, scriptable alternative to Zotero or Mendeley
• you want human-readable, plain-text (YAML) storage for bibliographic data
• you need BibTeX/BibLaTeX export for LaTeX workflows
• you want editor integration with (Neo)vim or Emacs

When to avoid

• you need a polished graphical reference manager out of the box
• you rely on proprietary cloud sync features of commercial tools
• you want a web-first experience (though a web app exists, CLI is primary)

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

cli search-engine documentation developer-tools developer-tools education cli cross-platform python bibliography-manager bibtex citation-management reference-manager academic-papers zotero-alternative yaml-storage tui command-line

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="papis/papis")