Stuck with Mendeley? Snowflake details inside

[SonOfMars]

Hello folks,

 

I searched through this forum but didn't specifically get an answer to my question so making a new thread. If its already been discussed, please direct me there.

 

I started organizing my pdfs with Papers (for mac), when Papers was relatively new. Eventually, I got a windows machine and Papers for Windows and the disaster struck. Papers for windows was so messed up (still is) that with 8GB of RAM, it would get hung more than I could probably use it, hence switched to Mendeley. All was well, until I moved..

 

And now, I prefer to read the articles on the train. I use Good Reader (via Dropbox) to read the papers but as I realized, Mendeley puts ALL articles in a single directory and I have about 3000 pdfs in my library for 5 different projects. Searching the paper you want to read in a list of 3000 pdf is very cumbersome. From Mendeley forums, I figured, once you are in Mendeley, there is no way out. You can NOT export the pdfs as collections. (A note, I can not use Mendeley app on my iPad as my library is bigger than 2GB and have no plans to pay for the extra space. I can not delete the pdfs either.)

 

With Papers, it had (not too sure now) an option where it could mirror the directory structure that it had in the application. Such thing doesn't exist in Mendeley as you can put one article in more than one collection.

 

So essentially, I am asking for help, if anyone has done it, to get out of/export Mendeley with the making a directory structure same as my collections in Mendeley. Mendeley folks say, its not doable at this moment and I don't know how to code so I am stuck.

Has anyone figured out how to export successfully out of Mendeley? If yes, how did you do it, except going through one by one article and its collection.

 

Many thanks in advance.

 

Bonus question: Which other pdf organizing application mirrors collection structure as folders on your hard drive?

[Eigen]

You could use Endnote, with the Endnote app. 

[lyrehc]

I use a combination of ReadCube and Endnote.  I like both but find ReadCube easier for annotating PDFs.

[CommPhD20]

I use Zotero and Zotfile, which allows me to sync entire library on Dropbox organized by my own parameters. I can also designate PDFs for tablet, which places them in a different directory which can be organized differently.

[ctg7w6]

Just get Sente. You have unlimited upload space once you upgrade to premium for a ONE-TIME FEE. It has an iPad app and it automatically syncs the PDFs, notes, highlights, etc.

[gliaful]

I use Mendeley, and I have all of my papers organized into folders (...maybe too many folders) by project, month/other time chunk, etc. Also, when I "Save to Mendeley", I write in a lot of unique tags that will help me remember the particular paper. I used to type things in the "notes" box but I could never find these notes anywhere when I looked at the papers in My Library. With the tags, however, all tags appear on the left sidebar and you can just click on them to find your paper or papers tagged with a particular tag.

 

I haven't explored the other pdf organizers, though, so if there's something better than Mendeley I wouldn't know. I've just found ways to get around the things I initially disliked about Mendeley.