Is there any chance of Paperpile integration happening within Scrivener? I use Scrivener purely for academic writing, and while I love it generally, the one thing I really struggle with is managing my references. For the last couple of years I have been using Paperpile as my reference management tool - it’s absolutely brilliant - far better than Endnote, Zotero or any of the others I have tried. At the moment my workflow is a slow and tortuous process of doing rough drafts and setting up the structures (including reference place holders) in Scrivener, then compiling to rtf to re-enter all the references in Google Docs, then realising that I need to get it all back into Scrivener to move on with the next draft. For big documents that require many revisions this is a very painful process, and proper integration would make such a difference. I have absolutely no connection with Paperpile, other than as a very happy user of it, but I do know from reading their forum that Scrivener integration is something that is on their roadmap - can you guys get together and make it happen? Please!
I don’t think it’s a Scrivener thing at all. There is a long recent thread on Zotero integration, boiling down to the realization that what is needed is for the ref.manager to run in the background so it can easily be evoked and insert some kind of cite keys. After compilation to e.g. Word the ref.manager is again called upon to translate the cite keys to proper references and to create the bibliography.
Papers 3 works in the same way.
Having a fully fledged ref.manager incorporated in a writing app seems to be quite difficult. Some of the guys behind the Papers app started to build an academic writing app which would be fully integrated with Papers - the Manuscripts app. They released a version 1 over two years ago and users are still complaining that several basic tasks (e.g. copy-paste) do not work. Among the latest posts in their user forum are several expressing serious concern that development seems to have stopped.
Their basic idea was very interesting, but making it work is a real challenge.
I’m not a developer so I may be talking complete garbage here, but my understanding of how the Paperpile /Google Docs thing works is that Paperpile does indeed run all the time in the background. Would that mean that such integration would be possible? In addition to the ‘Add to Library’ buttons that appear in Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus etc etc, there is an extension that sits in my Chrome browser that I use to add anything to the library at any time, together with a menu option within Google Docs that I can invoke at any time to insert the reference as and when in the document. The formal list of citations is generated later as a separate process which keeps sticking to word counts much easier.
If Paperpile can insert some kind of reference code (what I called cite key) in the text and then transform that to a proper reference in the output file after compilation to .docx or .rtf, then you already have it.
In Mac Scrivener you simply tell Scrivener which ref.manager you are using, in the Preferences.
No, looking at paperpile website, it seems to only support Google Docs, and is very locked in. There seem to be no temporary citations, and it generates a database on the fly as you write (like Endnote’s CWYW, but for Google). This means it is impossible for another writing program to integrate into this workflow. For Paperpile to work with Scrivener, it MUST support temporary (plain text) citations, that contain enough information for paperpile to later scan the document from your existing database. In this respect Paperpile is even worse (for integration with Scrivener) than Zotero. What Paperpile needs to do is offer a plain text temporary citation, and be able to copy it via OS functionality like the clipboard.
How about getting it to export a BibTeX key? If it can do that, and export the database as a BIB file then you could use Pandoc to generate your bibliographies. Both Pandoc and Paperpile use CSL files to make bibliographies…
Nontropo, The PaperPile site says “Your annotations are directly saved to the PDF and synced to Google Drive. Paperpile uses open standards to make sure you can read and edit your annotations with any other standards compliant program.” (paperpile.com/features/pdf-annotator). It seems to contradict what you’re saying. However, I’m not a technical person and I’m not really sure what you’re talking about 
I want to get your thoughts on this statement from Paperpile.
Paperpile seems designed to work specifically with Google Docs and Google Drive. At this time I believe you can’t save Scrivener files to Google Drive due to compatibility issues and Scrivener has a very specific file structure.
The ‘open standards’ referred to above is PDF. While PDF is an open standard that means programs compliant with that standard can read and depending upon scope, write to PDF. It doesn’t guarantee integration with other programs.
I think the best of the many many suggestions flying around for bibliography integration is this one: viewtopic.php?t=51779 - please add comments if you agree or suggestions for refinement.