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Ask HN: How can I keep track of academic papers?

14 points by TooManyPapers ↗ HN
If they were an text based webpage I could use instapaper or paper or readability. But when it comes to keeping track of pdfs it becomes an all out mess.

So far the best solution I have found is the kindle cloud software which seems to handle stuff decently well. But it's not the best and could be better.

How do you keep track of your acedemic papers?

14 comments

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skram
Have you looked into Zotero? https://www.zotero.org/
iamshs
One more vote for Zotero. It is an awesome nifty software, that I liked more than Mendeley. Yes, you will have to install Firefox plugin. The built-in features automatically pull the paper name, and tag authors too. I got fed up from downloading 4fgh7u.pdf names from ACS sites, and Zotero solved the name tagging, then collating into directories and sub-directories very easy. You can save webpages too etc. I totally recommend it.
blahedo
I know it's appallingly low-tech, but when I download a PDF, I paste the author/title into a text file alongside the PDF's filename. Works well for as infrequently as I check any particular paper.
dennybritz
I agree that this is a problem that hasn't been solved yet. Two things I do:

- Label papers in Google scholar. It's a bit of a pain though.

- I put all the PDFs into Dropbox and have a folder hierarchy. I can access Dropbox from all my devices and 3rd party apps.

slocklin01
These days: I stick them in labeled subdirectories, sync my machines using BitTorrentSync, and use an org-emacs file or two to keep notes. Not awesome, but it keeps most of the visible work flow within emacs (which can view PDF files these days).

A friend does something similar, but uses BibTex to keep track of things.

neumann
this is what I use. The only thing missing is a nice quick cli text search to compete with spotlight/mendeley text search. i have yet to try pdfgrep and such.
davecap1
Papers app for Mac (http://www.papersapp.com/mac/) is probably the best that I've tried. For other platforms I'd suggest Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/).
ajarmst
+1 for Papers. It's got a lot of amazing features. I particularly like that I can set it up to use my University Library proxy and use it to search various databases and download, index, and make biblio entries for papers automatically.
RubberSoul
I am an academic using Zotero and it's great. The Chrome plugin allows me to download PDF and metadata at the click of a button. User written plugins allow me to sync selected articles to my iPad and extract annotations I make on the device. It also has automatic backup via WebDAV so that I can re-download an article in my library anywhere.
nemesis1637
I'll catch flack here for this I'm sure. But when I was I grad school I installed a SharePoint instance and used it solely for this. It worked perfectly.
sytelus
I use GoodReader. It's really the best PDF on tablets/phones with ability to annotate, highlight and so on. Problem is that there is no web version but for that you might use dropbox or Google drive anyway.