

Ask HN: What do you use to organize e-books and research papers? - skyfallsin

I'm using Dropbox to keep them organized, share interesting ones, and Mendeley Desktop for organizing papers. Anyone have any other suggestions?
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a235
<http://www.mendeley.com/> \-- the best free tool

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zatara
Is it better now? I have tested it before but it was too buggy for serious
loading (PhD thesis), although I liked very much the interface and features.

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larsberg
The in-application browsing experience is pretty lame on OSX and Windows, but
'open externally' works great.

The iOS app is almost there. Once it has sync like the desktop (right now you
have to individually download each!) and supports opening in GoodReader so
there's good display and editing, it will be useful. But for now, if you want
to do any practical device reading, you'll probably want to pull it down on
the desktop and transfer into GoodReader via iTunes.

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gammarator
Papers is quite nice (<http://mekentosj.com/papers/>). Caveats: Mac/iOS only,
not free.

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babeKnuth
I've been using this for the past 4 years. They've got a nice iPad app that
includes highlighting, but unfortunately their desktop app can't handle
highlighting yet. :(

Their priorities are a bit backward. The desktop app has been surpassed by
almost all other competitors mentioned here. Sad. Used to be great.

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cfontes
Calibre... for me solves all problems

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jeffcoat
I keep Calibre's library on Dropbox, and so also solve the problem of keeping
my library in sync between different computers.

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zatara
I have been through all the apps mentioned here and settled on Sente
(www.thirdstreetsoftware.com). Very powerful, does all the biblio/citation
thing if you need it, as well as the visualization part that Papers does. It
is not as polished as specific tools (such as a Papers/Endnote combo), but I
find it nice to store all my pdfs in one place, automatically adding meta data
through Google Scholar, Pubmed or whatever, and commenting/highlighting in the
same application. There are also some very good applescripts to export notes
to Devonthink and implement a citation database à la Steven Johnson
([http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002...](http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html)).
My main library also sits in Dropbox, and is always accessible even when I am
not at a Mac.

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apgwoz
I started using BibDesk (<http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/>) with Dropbox just
last week and have been pretty happy with it so far. I don't have anything,
yet, for books, but I suppose I could just write BibTex entries for the books
and be done with it.

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openmedi
I'm using Yep! for organizing my Documents via OpenMeta-Tags (they're
synchable via Dropbox). Yep uses Spotlight for indexing Documents so you're
able to find fast. The cool part is that you can have a second organizational
structure on the data level. (You're able to put PDFs where you need them, eg.
project folders, and still find them in Yep!) For bibliographys and stuff like
that I use Sente. I search for all my PDFs with a certain tag in Yep and just
add them one by one to sente. This works great for me. Btw: Sente is also able
to create a synced copy, which is great if you have different macs (like I do)
and working longer on a paper or article.

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evgen
I tend to keep my e-books and research papers in different piles in one sense.
Calibre handles the e-books better than just about anything else out there.
For research papers I use DEVONThink. I tend to be a bit of a research paper
pack-rat and DT makes it easy for me to find what I want in my huge slushpile
of PDFs. The current DT iOS app is a bit of a work in progress, but until it
gets to the same level us usefulness that the desktop version of DT had I can
easily dump papers for mobile reading via the Dropbox->GoodReader path.

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mmc
I use BibDesk to search for and organize research papers and Skim to read them
(both Mac OS).

I like to write company-confidential notes on the papers, so I don't sync them
anywhere external, so as to comply with security guidelines.

That ends up meaning that 'sharing' papers means just emailing the PDFs
around.

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nebaneba
Mendeley to organize, Xournal to read + annotate, git to store, share, sync.

The git part somewhat laborious, but until SparkleShare gets released
officially that's what I'll work with.

I should add that I arrived at Mendeley after Bibdesk, after Zotero.

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yankcrime
Yojimbo (<http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/>) plays quite nicely for
this sort of thing, and works with Dropbox too to keep your library
synchronised across multiple machines.

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nzmsv
CiteULike (<http://www.citeulike.org>) for papers. I like the ability to
upload PDFs so that I don't have to keep jumping around paywalls every time I
want to refer to an article.

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trustfundbaby
ibooks app on the Ipad with Dropbox ... as long as its in pdf format you can
just put it in dropbox and add it to ibooks from there. love it.

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tmachinecharmer
Zotero

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niels_olson
Mendeley integrates with zotero, fwiw.

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xtho
bibtex + file system

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yedingding
I'm using CloudApp for most of the sharing and then Dropbox for bigger files.
I really want to recommend Papers. It's really nice and keep me away from the
documents explosion.

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dgroves
A folder called Bibliography with files named as follows:
"first_authors_last_name' 'year_of_paper' 'title_of_paper.extension"

