How do you organize your digital library?

[AP]

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]

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]

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]

Thanks! @fuzzylogician I'll look into BibDesk. 

[TakeruK]

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.

[Neist]

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]

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.