Mendeley is good for this, and specifically designed for managing a library of academic papers. It supports tagging and full text searches, as well as some half-baked “social” features which can be safely ignored. The most useful feature for me is that it can watch a directory for new papers, and add them to its library as well as my directory tree (author/year/paper). It can also maintain a bibtex file for the entire library which is handy for citations.
Depending on how many you save per month, a premiumEvernote might be useful for this—it allows you to organize and search inside PDFs, among other things. A premium account has a limit of 1 Gb of saved stuff a month, but that seems pretty reasonable to me.
(Edit to clarify: There is no limit to the amount of stuff you can save in an evernote account, just a limit to how much you can add to it per month. There does not, unfortunately, seem to be a way to add a backlog of things all at once, though, so it might not be the best option for people with extensive collections already.)
Poorly. I have a NAS that holds tens of thousands of PDFs. They are organized in folders, one for each letter of the alphabet, by last name of the first author. It begins:
AAAI—Interim report August 2009.pdf Abbey—Charles Taylor.pdf Abbott—A note on the nature of water.pdf Abbott—Fodor and Lepore on Meaning Similarity and Compositionality.pdf Abbott—Realism, model theory, and linguistic semantics.pdf Abbott—Water = H2O.pdf Abbruzzese—On using the multiverse to avoid the paradoxes of time travel.pdf Abdel-Khalek—Happiness, health, and religiosity, significant relations.pdf
How do you keep track of PDFs of studies?
Mendeley is good for this, and specifically designed for managing a library of academic papers. It supports tagging and full text searches, as well as some half-baked “social” features which can be safely ignored. The most useful feature for me is that it can watch a directory for new papers, and add them to its library as well as my directory tree (author/year/paper). It can also maintain a bibtex file for the entire library which is handy for citations.
Alas, Mendeley always crashes when I tell it to watch the directory on my NAS for new papers.
Depending on how many you save per month, a premium Evernote might be useful for this—it allows you to organize and search inside PDFs, among other things. A premium account has a limit of 1 Gb of saved stuff a month, but that seems pretty reasonable to me.
(Edit to clarify: There is no limit to the amount of stuff you can save in an evernote account, just a limit to how much you can add to it per month. There does not, unfortunately, seem to be a way to add a backlog of things all at once, though, so it might not be the best option for people with extensive collections already.)
Poorly. I have a NAS that holds tens of thousands of PDFs. They are organized in folders, one for each letter of the alphabet, by last name of the first author. It begins:
AAAI—Interim report August 2009.pdf
Abbey—Charles Taylor.pdf
Abbott—A note on the nature of water.pdf
Abbott—Fodor and Lepore on Meaning Similarity and Compositionality.pdf
Abbott—Realism, model theory, and linguistic semantics.pdf
Abbott—Water = H2O.pdf
Abbruzzese—On using the multiverse to avoid the paradoxes of time travel.pdf
Abdel-Khalek—Happiness, health, and religiosity, significant relations.pdf
CiteULike is quite nice for this.
Connotea is a similar “personal research library” service but it doesn’t let you store PDFs, just links to articles.
Zotero (a Firefox extension) is fantastic for this.