Zotero is my go-to for organizing citations, and I use their link-to-stored-article feature and a backed up folder of PDFs for storage. Notes are all in Obsidian, which has the flexibility to change as I shift organization schemas!
Currently, regardless of folder in my file tree, all books, articles, etc. get renamed in the format "AuthorSurname(s) Year Title(sometimes abbreviated)". That way I always know it's searchable.
Eventually my library staff wife will assist me in sorting and organization.
I do the same with filenames, so at least I can rifle through/search to see what I have. The trouble is remembering what I have! There's so much information on this hard drivethat I keep looking past because I don't remember what Name Year.pdf contains :/
I have pondered this for months. I didn't like the Zotero UI and decided to make a simple spreadsheet to tell me the basic info (author/date/short title/topic) & where the pdf lives on the computer. Not very fancy but it makes sense to me. Am cataloging years of "I'll just save that somewhere" files
I’m so glad to hear this! I SO want some app to just let me file PDFs with notes and maybe something approximating a sticky note on the file and nothing does - I “lose” files I’ve had for years all the time bc I just don’t recognize the file name. It’s so frustrating!
ReadCube/papers has some very useful AI integration allowing for quite robust retrieval, citation, organizing, annotation, and search tools. Also, the Mendeley app/extension could prove useful to some.
I switched to Zotero after years of never being able to find which folder I'd put a PDF in and ending up with 5 copies. I still do citations manually but for organising and storing files (& tagging them) it's v handy plus can sync across devices – I pay for a storage upgrade and have a LOT in there
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Eventually my library staff wife will assist me in sorting and organization.