Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
I use a little script [1] and a passive approach to quickly find a PDF I am looking for among a few thousands of academic PDF. The workflow (illustrated in the GIF [2]):<p>- as I read new PDFs in the browser, the PDFs are passively downloaded typically in a Downloads/ folder.<p>- This results in thousands in papers lying in Downloads/ or elsewhere.<p>- The command p from the script [1] let me instantaneously fuzzy-search over the first page of each pdf (The first page of each pdf is extracted using pdftotext, but cached so it's fast). The first page of academic PDFs usually contains title, abstract, author names, institutions, keywords of the paper; so typing any combination of those will quickly find the pdf.<p>What is particularly convenient is that no time is spent trying to organize the papers into folders, or importing them into software such as zotero. The papers are passively downloaded, and if I remember ever downloading a paper, it's one fuzzy-search away. Of course it does not solve the problem of generating clean bibtex files.<p>[1]: the script: <a href="https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p</a><p>[2]: an illustration in GIF: <a href="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1019692/34446795-12229072-ecac-11e7-856a-ec0df0de60ae.gif" rel="nofollow">https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1019692/34446795-1...</a><p>edit: The script has been moved from the gist to the public repository <a href="https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p</a>