AP Posted September 2, 2016 Posted September 2, 2016 I have been a grad student for some time now. As many of you, I have hundreds of books and articles in my laptop. I've always found it daunting to organize all these files into folders. During coursework, I organized digital books/articles by course. During exams, by exam. During my prospectus writing, by other categories. After I was done with all that, I rearranged my digital library in other, broad folders. How do you organize all those articles and books you have in your computer? Folder-wise, how do you do it? I have everything on Zotero with tags, but my problem is how to save the actual documents. Does this make sense? Any ideas?
fuzzylogician Posted September 2, 2016 Posted September 2, 2016 I don't know if this will help you, but I use BibDesk for all my bibliography needs. It allows me to add tags, highlight text so it shows up in a dedicated dialog box, sort my bibliography by author, year, etc., and link documents with bib entries. My bibliography is organized in a big folder with a sub-folder for each author. File names are AuthorYear. New documents are automatically archived in the correct folder by BibDesk when I associate them with a bib entry (this is a setting you can enable, and involves simply dragging the file from wherever it is into the bib entry). Getting started for me involved importing a .bib file from a colleague who has similar research interests, moving pdfs to those entries that the file already contained and creating new entries for the other ones. Some work went into that, but I don't remember it as a particular hardship.
rising_star Posted September 2, 2016 Posted September 2, 2016 My system is a folder labeled "Research" with articles saved by author(s) and date. If there's more than one that would otherwise have the same file name, then I'll add a hyphen and a keyword so I can distinguish them. But I also rarely end up consulting the actual PDFs that are saved on my computer...
AP Posted September 4, 2016 Author Posted September 4, 2016 Thanks! @fuzzylogician I'll look into BibDesk.
TakeruK Posted September 4, 2016 Posted September 4, 2016 I use Mendeley and like Zotero, I can put tags (or "folders") to categorize the papers in my digital library. Mendeley also takes care of the physical files themselves though. I currently have it set to something like a folder for each author, a folder for year, and then a file containing the title of the paper. However, this is automatically done by Mendeley and if I wanted it to go Year/Author/Title.pdf or Journal/Year/Author/title.pdf etc I just have to change my preferences and it's all automatically redone. In reality, I never actually try to navigate through the folders where the real PDFs live because I view everything thru Mendeley. If I needed the actual PDF (to send to a friend, for example), I can tell Mendeley to navigate to the folder that contains the paper and I get to the PDF right away, without having to remember how my PDF system works. AP 1
Neist Posted September 5, 2016 Posted September 5, 2016 I like Paperpile. It's not a well-known program, but it completely integrates into Chrome/Drive. Automatically sorts them, too. Like it a lot.
Butterfly_effect Posted October 9, 2016 Posted October 9, 2016 I second zotero. I use the web zotero button to save article citation info and PDFs at the same time, then annotate the PDFs with a program like Preview. That way I have a searchable archive and if I want individual notes I can double click any title and my annotated PDF will open. I also sometimes save summaries in Evernote.
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