I’m using BibDesk. I tried Mendeley but came away unconvinced.
I’ve found BibDesk’s handling of PDFs and other “attached documents” quite adequate, other than importing.
I solved the “import” issue in a different way than you seem to be approaching it. I don’t know that any existing tool does this “import metadata” really well, so what I did was Google the title of my papers, then steal the .bib entry for that paper from ACM or IEEE or whatever repository had the paper on file. This is manual and time-consuming but leads to better data quality.
I’ve tried a recent version of Sente, and it does a really nice job of streamlining the process of importing PDFs into bib entries, but it’s still a manual, one-by-one process. I was very happy to get through about 50 unsorted papers in, I’d say, a quarter hour. For my needs that may be sufficient.
Have you found anything able to digest your 80K papers?
ETA: now that I see it, I remember trying it back when I was still using Firefox. Have you been using the new standalone version? It’s possible that this will be an improvement over the FF version—I switched to Chrome a while back finding FF just too damn slow and resource-hogging.
I’m using BibDesk. I tried Mendeley but came away unconvinced.
I’ve found BibDesk’s handling of PDFs and other “attached documents” quite adequate, other than importing.
I solved the “import” issue in a different way than you seem to be approaching it. I don’t know that any existing tool does this “import metadata” really well, so what I did was Google the title of my papers, then steal the .bib entry for that paper from ACM or IEEE or whatever repository had the paper on file. This is manual and time-consuming but leads to better data quality.
Yeah, right now I’m using Zotero basically streamline that manual process.
I’ve tried a recent version of Sente, and it does a really nice job of streamlining the process of importing PDFs into bib entries, but it’s still a manual, one-by-one process. I was very happy to get through about 50 unsorted papers in, I’d say, a quarter hour. For my needs that may be sufficient.
Have you found anything able to digest your 80K papers?
Yes. Papers + a personal assistant.
Did you try Papers? It has good reviews, a new 2.0 version, an iPad companion app. Supposedly has metadata import now.
Interesting, I’ll give it a try.
ETA: now that I see it, I remember trying it back when I was still using Firefox. Have you been using the new standalone version? It’s possible that this will be an improvement over the FF version—I switched to Chrome a while back finding FF just too damn slow and resource-hogging.
Yes, I’ve been using the standalone version with the Chrome plugin.