Papers

A reference-management app for researchers, built with Flutter. Organize papers, read and annotate PDFs, generate citations (APA/MLA/Chicago/Harvard/IEEE), and back everything up to Google Drive.

Runs on Windows desktop and Android.

Features

• Library: papers with authors, tags, favorites, filtering and full-text search (SQLite FTS5)
• Import: by DOI (CrossRef lookup), PDF file, or pasted BibTeX
• Reader: PDF viewer with highlight and note annotations
• Citations: formatted citations in 5 styles, BibTeX/RIS export
• Sync: PDFs + a JSON metadata manifest in a visible Papers folder in Google Drive

Running on Windows

flutter run -d windows

Sign-in options on the login screen:

• Sign in with Google — required for Drive sync. Needs a one-time OAuth client setup (below).
• Continue without an account — local-only library, no sync. Requires the Anonymous sign-in provider to be enabled in the Firebase console.

One-time Google sign-in setup (Windows)

The google_sign_in plugin has no Windows implementation, so the app uses an OAuth 2.0 loopback flow through your browser. It needs a Desktop app OAuth client:

1. Open Google Cloud console → Credentials
2. Create Credentials → OAuth client ID → Application type: Desktop app
3. Paste the client ID and secret into lib/core/auth/desktop_oauth_config.dart (or pass --dart-define=GOOGLE_DESKTOP_CLIENT_ID=... / --dart-define=GOOGLE_DESKTOP_CLIENT_SECRET=... when building)
4. Make sure the Google Drive API is enabled for the project (API library)

Tests

flutter test

The database tests run against the same SQLite FFI engine the Windows app uses.