Sonny Software

I am curious how users are filing their downloaded pdf articles. I made use of long filenames for easy searching in the case of a third party reference software failure (God Forbid).

Such As..

First(Corresponding) Author, Journal Volume(Issue) Year, Abbreviation of Title.pdf

Before spotlight arrived. this was quite helpful for searching in the finder. However, now that spotlight can search within pdf's, it is not very useful.

I would like to know how others are filing their personal libraries for journal articles. I have created a poll and would like input from the Bookends users.

Thanks in Advance.
Matt

mtauton wrote: First(Corresponding) Author, Journal Volume(Issue) Year, Abbreviation of Title.pdf

Hi there,
in my lab we are using the following format, which has served us well.
FirstAuthorLastName Year Journal.pdf
(i.e. "other" in the poll).
we have a list of alphabetic folders on the lab server, where pdfs go according to the last name of the first author.
best

Gert

I like to be able to see what a paper is about from the filename, so I take full advantage of OS X's support for long filenames, including as much of the title as possible and often the author's name, as well as some other citation info if the title isn't too long. An example is:

Zamel recent research on writing pedagogy TQ21-4 1987 697-715

In this way, the PDF is more immediately identifiable when I'm using it outside of Bookends.

There may be a downside to this ad hoc practice that I'll discover down the road, but for the time being it seems to be a good method.

I use DevonThink. It's completely changed whe way I organize my scientific thinking.

Too bad there is no simple way to drag a PDF into Bookends and have it extract the bioliographic information. I think people would pay a lot for that.

I use AuthorLastName Year Journal Volume.

I wonder if it would be lot of trouble to provide a preference that would allow users to specify what information to use in naming the file-- something like the choices we have now for displaying files in list view.

I like Gerson's idea for making a bookends preference setting for naming pdf journal articles that are attached to the references.

Maybe Jon can develope something toward this goal.

This is a good thread and thank for the comments and votes. Keep them coming.

I think bookends should manage both your reference database and the file naming of attached pdf's.

First_Author_Last_Name Journal_Abr_Title Year.pdf

Like
Smith EMBO 2006.pdf

I'm really miss the function, where you can rename auto-downloads.

In the next update PubMed downloads will be named kind of like that (the names will follow the convention used for attaching documents directly, except the PMID will be added at the end). User-configurable names are something we will revisit in an update after that.

Jon
Sonny Software