I've been thinking about this for some time and come to the same
problems.
I've been just throwing the PDF files into a "already printed" folder
after
printing them out, but there is no real correlation with the PDF file
names
and the subjects or titles (and if you change the PDF file name you
might
accidently download the same paper again and not realize it...)
It would be nice to have some web-based way of accessing the papers, the
best ideas I came up with was a "canonical name" directory with the
actual
paper data in it (like Cran2007, Same2005, etc) except that it would
be a directory with metadata in it (structure?) as well as the actual
PDF file.
Maybe the abstract in ASCII form for searching?
Then a bunch of other directories of symbolic links for author,
subject, keywords etc.
I should note my advisor has 10 or 12 filing cabinets (i.e., 50 drawers)
full of paper papers, all indexed by his huge BibTex file, in which he
has
added additional fields to track data beyond what BibTeX recognizes.
It would be an interesting design to try to computerize something like
that.
On Oct 1, 2008, at 2:08 PM, Nick Cummings wrote:
For a while I've really wanted to have some sort of database that
would
allow me to keep track of papers relevant to my research. Basically,
right now I just download papers I find that are of interest, and put
them in a hierarchy of directories by subject. This has a couple of
problems: 1) It takes time to do the organizing. 2) The subject
matter
of papers is not hierarchical, it's more of a web. 3) There's no easy
way to store metadata about the paper (e.g., author & title) such that
it can be browsed through without opening every paper. 4) No
convenient
way to track read/unread status. 5) It's not searchable. I'm hoping
there's a piece of software one can use on Linux to help with this
sort
of thing, either software specifically for this purpose or one that
could be adapted without very much work (or much programming
expertise). Surely some of you bright academics have tried to find a
solution to this sort of problem before. :-) I'm also open to web
services for these purposes, my only hesitation is that I may then end
up with my info locked into it with no possibility to migrate later.
I've come up with some idea for solutions, but none seem all that
good:
1) I could simply keep a spreadsheet (or text file) with each paper's
associated information (bibliographic info, read/unread status,
tags/keywords) and the file name of the paper (if it exists). 2) Try
to
use my BibTeX bibliographic database and Pybliographic GUI to keep
track
of all the info about papers and, again, point to file locations (not
sure how feasible this is). 3) Hope I can find a URL for the
abstract of
each paper and use del.icio.us to bookmark and tag each one. Make
sure
to put all bibliographic info in the notes section.
Of those, #1 seems like the most plausible solution but far from
ideal.
Regards,
Nick
