How do you organize your literature? - How do you organize your literature on your computer? (Aug/08/2011 )

Hi everybody,

I've been reading different topics on this forum but just now I registered myself so I can start posting myself.

I would like to know how you organize your literature on your computer. I myself have a mac and I heard that 'papers' is a good software to organize everything. But this still costs 59 euro's so I would like to know whether there are other programs that are free? Or do you have other tips and tricks? I'd like to hear how you organize everything! Thanks.

I use Peaya and Zotero. They're both free.

And have you ever heard of mendeley? Is that good?

I use endnote for citing, so it would really just be for organizing my literature.

I have the papers themselves in a folder with each file called: "1st author name (etal (if necessary)) date". My citing system is freeware called Jabref which uses the "authordate" system for indexing, so it is very convenient.

Mendeley is quite good to organize your literature. You can for example search the whole pdf for keywords (not only the abstract), and then open the file with a click. Importing is easy too, it will automatically extract Author, title etc from your pdf file (which does not always work well, sometimes you'll have to correct it).

However, you can not search PubMed and import the abstract like you can in Endnote. Or maybe I haven't figured that out. Also, stay away from the online database stuff on Mendeley. You'll get little storage (for more you have to pay), but it always tries to export your files automatically. Which doesn't work (not enough storage), but takes 5 minutes every time to find it out again. Maybe you can switch that automatic update off, but I haven't figured that out either.

The Mendeley MS Word plug-in really likes to fight with Endnote, so better not activate that either. Again, I don't know how to switch it off. Maybe I should spend some time with it and figure it all out. However, I'd expect from a good programm to give me full access to all features in an intuitive way.

So Mendeley for organizing, Endnote for writing is the way I work.

Thanks for the responses!

Rsm on Tue Aug 9 09:11:23 2011 said:

Could you explain this pls.

I do not understand what you mean. Do you mean that you can search in a pdf file for certain keywords without opening the pdf file?

(like for example: I have downloaded 10 pdf files that might be interesting and then I can search certain words in those, still closed pdf files, and only open those files with those words in it?


Also extract author etc: I simply copy post the title, author etc... I cant imagine you win time using a program for that?

josse on Fri Sep 2 12:06:35 2011 said:

Yes, you don't need to open the pdf. It will search the whole pdf for your keyword. Like using Google: you type a keyword and Google shows the URL and some context of the keyword that it found, without opening the whole website.
You don't need to copy paste anything. You'll download the pdf (filename 123.pdf for example), and you import it into Mendeley, and the programm will extract Author, Journal, Date and so on by itself.
Oh, did I mention that you can't print from Mendeley...? You'd need to open the pdf with Acrobat and then print, which is not very convenient.

qiqqa is best for me

Rsm on Tue Aug 9 09:11:23 2011 said:

I with Agree this.
Mendeley is good for organizing but unfortunately is totally a mess as citation manager. It doesn't have journal abbreviation and many other features compared to EndNote.

Readcube is a new pdf manager coming out and looks very promising. It is also sponsered by Nature.