Organising your PDF files

Anybody who has been working with PDF files knows that organising them is really a problem.Especially when the files are research papers.i have tried several methods that are available currently available to organise PDF files,including annotating them with Endnote,using google desktop to index them,special file organising software like easy articles, personal brain ,and Paperworks.But they all lacked some or other feature that was indispensible.
If you are in the academic field (who are my target audience) then you must be knowing that just organsing PDFs is not enough you need to have the citation/bibliographic data for the papers also.I have been using this service called Citeulike which allows you to store the paper references that you need or intend to read and also allows you to export the reference to Endnote.Till now the service allowed you to store just the reference!..now a new feature has been added that actually allows you to upload the corresponding PDF file for a reference,whereby you can access the PDF when and wherever you want via an internet connected PC.The ease with which you can access your files is just mindblowing. Head overand try the fantastic service.

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13 responses to “Organising your PDF files”

  1. Have you tried Connotea, and if so, what do you think?

  2. Yes i’ve tried Connotea too and i love it but it lacks something that i am not able to point out exactly that Citeulike has.Speaking of organising PDFs i’ve now found peace in a fantastic piece of software called Papers – unfortunatley Mac only! Available at http://mekentosj.com/papers/

  3. Im really looking for a program that will go through my pdf’s that I have stored on my computer and rename them according to either authors or title of pdf from within the pdf. I know this is a big ask but whats the best piece of software for organising pdf’s directly on your pc rather than online?

  4. Try http://www.mendeley.com/ Would have a review up here soon.

  5. Thanks Bala…am going to try mendeley beta

  6. hi,

    I have stumbled on your post while looking for a program to organise my 10+ Gb collection of scientific articles. you said you have already tried a lot of organising programs. can you seggest on for me please? I am looking for a program that will allow me to look into a pdf file and tagg it with some keywords then I can do a search on those keywords and I can copy the files containing a specific keyword into a directory.

    I hope I am not asking too much…

    Lucian

  7. oh btw I am a windows user so this probably makes the problem tougher…

  8. @Lucian As i’ve put in the comments, Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/) seems to be the best one out there for now. Hope that would help you out.

    1. Mendeley would be just the perfect tool for this; unfortunately it has a pdf upload limit of 500Mb which is definitely not adapted to our needs (I have also more than 10Gb of pdfs).
      If this is increased in the future, I would definitely use Mendeley.

  9. lol quite a few of the reviews many people distribute are a bit spacey, commonly i think about if they realistically read the content pages and threads before leaving a comment or whether or not they barely look at the titles and submit the very first idea that comes to mind. regardless, it is nice to browse through smart commentary now and then rather than the same exact, traditional post vomit which i typically notice on the net i’m off to play a few rounds of zynga poker have a pleasant day

  10. After reading this post and the comments, I tried Citeulike, it is too slow and clumsy for my needs. Mendeley Desktop looks more promising, once the limitations have been lifted. I tried CD Catalog Expert, and this is so much quicker, although a different approach to Citeulike. CD Catalog Expert can export to html as well as having a built-in search facility. Don’t be put off by CD in the title, it will catalog terabyte drives, which takes a bit longer than a CD of course, but the results are worth it.

  11. I tried Benubird PDF. Works very good! only missing the citation option that you can find in Mendeley

  12. For organizing PDFs and tagging them with different keywords Calibre is also good option.

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