Can anyone recommend a good article management tool - (Mar/22/2013 )

I am currently working on my thesis. With so many PDF documents, it's really hard to manage all these articles. Which tool you think is better for helping organize these articles?

you can find some suggestions in the subforum "reading and organizing literature" in the "dissertation and paper writing" forum.

I prefer printing out articles and put them into yellow folders according to topics.

pcrman on Sat Mar 23 06:35:26 2013 said:

How does fulltext seach work on that?

Trof on Sat Mar 23 13:07:25 2013 said:

I know printing articles is a bit environmentally unfriendly, to me, reading on paper is easier than on screen because you can make marks and notes freely while reading.

Enviromentally friendlyness is really not a question (how many completelly useless catalogues you get each year, how friendly is that) but I really wondered how you do it, if you need to search for something inside the paper or within. There are tools in PDF readers that allow highlighting and adding comments and stuff and saving it with PDF file. Moreover you can note web pages and so on.

I particulary moved everything I have into electronic form, except for the labbbook and those things I really prefer to have on paper, like sequences of genes with marked mutations in them, that would be really a time consuming task to do electronically, I have in dual form, that means one paper copy with markings and one electronic I can search (that is essential specifically for sequences) and then find it due to line numbering in the paper sequence. I couldn't be as now relying only on paper, because file you can copy (even with notes) and have with you all the time, everywhere. Also electronic format has the advantage to be foldered in several virtual folders at once.
I think even if you prefer reading in paper form it's good to have a double in electronic, and there is this question how to manage it.

Thing is I'm not really sure myself. I'm naming the file with the abbreviations of the complete title, because that is the main thing I recognise articles by, I don't remember author or journal, some people have only names and years or so, but I would't really know what paper it is and what's it about, titles tell at least something. Downside is when my boss refers to some "famous XY paper in Nature" I have no idea which one it is
I keep them in roughly thematic folders, but for some papers that have more tha one topic I create a symlink to include the file virtualy into several folders.
And of course the main tool is fulltext search in PDFs, I'm not sure how W7 is with that now, I was using external desktop searches, that could do that. As Google is saying, search is everything, if you can define a good search, you don't need to organize at all.

pcrman on Sat Mar 23 22:56:05 2013 said:

I also print out some papers (at least those that are really important and that I want to study in more detail), however a reference manager is still helpful for organising and referencing the papers for a thesis or a paper etc.

And I also archive them in computer folders, but there I only call them like "Smith J Cell Bio 2009" because when I read a paper I always try to associate the content with the first author's name - in most cases it works fine, but could of course become increasingly difficult as the library grows

Ah ha, thank you for all of your replies! I just searched out a reference manager tool named "readcube", it can automatically show the article name in that software! That's awesome! Since usually when i download some articles from some websites, the name of the file is really hard for me to recognize what exactly the topic is...

I am a molecular biologist and I use readcube every day. It is great for staying on top of new research and keeping all of my documents organized. I can do my research so much more efficiently now because I don't have to move between my internet browser and my desktop--Readcube allows me to do everything all in the desktop application.

I am an graduate student, and I am doing research for my professor. I used to use Endnote, but now I am using ReadCube everyday. I can directly use it to search articles vs I had to export the article to desktop endnote before reading it. Enhanced PDF is my favorite function, you can easily find related articles that was cited in your current article. It really saved me lot of time. I high recommend everyone get rid of Endnote and start to use ReadCube. It's free software and can be easily downloaded from http://www.readcube.com/