Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Organizing papers

I am looking for a way to organize the academic papers that have, over the past year or so, accumulated in big snowdrifts across my desk and shelves. A digital way. I can store them - as my advisor does - in filing cabinets alphabetically by author, but this is less searchable than I'd like. What I really want is some kind of already-customized personal wiki that I can use to store pdf/dvi files of papers, along with some metadata, like a short, searchable summary: title, authors, year, publication name, and maybe my own summary of the results and usefulness of the paper. Enough to remind me of reading the paper, and in a format that is easily searchable.

A private wiki seems to reasonably satisfy my requirements. In a wiki, I could cross-link articles that cite each other, and even do fancier things like have a page where I list all the claims in my M. Sc. research paper and link to the pages for their citations.

Does such software exist? I am surely not the first academic to need and think of such a thing.

I looked at Bibsonomy, but it is not quite what I have in mind. I don't need a social site, or even an online service. Ideally, it would be private and I could maintain it on my own.


This post's theme comic:

2 comments:

Alicia said...

I recommend the program Papers

Christian Muise said...

Hands down -- Mendeley ( http://www.mendeley.com )

Does everything you wanted and is available on all OS's (plus online).

Cheers