Two of my favorite programs on the Mac are Papers and DEVONthink Pro Office. Papers provides a terrific interface for storing and organizing journal articles, and DEVONthink Pro Office offers powerful indexing and searching of PDF files.
Recently I was thrilled to find an easy way to use the two programs together. If Papers is configured to store your PDF files in its library (the default), DEVONthink can index these without duplicating them in its database. To configure:
- Launch DEVONthink
- Open an existing DEVONthink database or create a new one
- Choose “Index…” from the “File” menu
- Locate and select the folder where your Papers library is stored (by default the folder is called “Papers” and it’s stored in the “Documents” folder in your home directory)
If you have a large number of papers, it may take a while for DEVONthink to index them. Once indexing is complete, you’ll see a folder structure that mimics the structure of your Papers library. You can now search your PDF files in DEVONthink!
To update your DEVONthink index (e.g., after adding articles to your Papers library), click on the “Papers” folder in your DEVONthink database and choose “Synchronize” from the “File” menu.
Victor A. Barger 
Great tip – just out of interest does this use more filespace or less than importing the PDF’s into Devonthink?
Also just wondered whether you might have any ideas about something I’m trying to do:
I’m using Devonthink as well & just wondered whether you might have found a good way of searching for Bible references in your Devonthink database.
E.g. I want to find a talk or some notes on John 6:51-18, but I don’t want to find all the docs with just the word ‘John’ in it, and docs on John 6 might be useful, as might docs on John 5-8
Any ideas?
Thanks
Tim