

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

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.<p>So far the best solution I have found is the kindle cloud software which seems to handle stuff decently well.  But it&#x27;s not the best and could be better.<p>How do you keep track of your acedemic papers?
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davecap1
Papers app for Mac
([http://www.papersapp.com/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/](http://www.mendeley.com/)).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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skram
Have you looked into Zotero?
[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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sycren
Mendeley - [http://www.mendeley.com/](http://www.mendeley.com/)

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marmarlade
Seconded.

