Zotero/Mendeley/Endnote : how do you organize your content?

[adel9216]

Hello everyone,

I am curious to know how you organize your Zotero/Mendeley/EndNote libraries. I know there is a tag and collections function in Zotero (which is the software I am using), but I am wondering how other researchers organize their content in their reference manager.

Thank you!

[polly_mer]

I use Bibdesk with keywords, abstracts, and notes fields and take advantage of the full-entry-text search function.

The individual PDF files live in directories by journal/source and every item is named according to firstAuthor_source_volPageYear or reasonable equivalent.

[mamselle]

I label files with yyyy.mm.dd of pub first, then author, etc. That sorts files in order of appearance, making a lit. review fairly simple to organize.

M.

[adel9216]

Okay. With the web-clipper and Zotero, everytime I see an article that is interesting for my research, I upload it in a "to-be organized" folder. But I don't know if that's actually effective, because I have an increasing number of references in there, that I need to correct, organize, read the abstracts, etc.

[mamselle]

Someday you'll have an admin who will do it for you....

(Only partly kidding, that's how I learned to use them, as an EA to a lab manager, once...)

M.

[polly_mer]

Someday you'll have an admin who will do it for you....

I am still waiting for that day because that kind of admin is one that's been cut almost everywhere that isn't the elitest of the elite institutions.

But I don't know if that's actually effective

It is not effective to just let an electronic pile get bigger. 

When I start a new project, I block off several weeks to just do the literature review as my primary activity on that project.  I start skimming right away on the first couple of days so I can establish a list of keywords and one electronic card for each source, just as I was taught to do in elementary school when everything was paper and index cards.  I love the electronic organization in Bibdesk so I can let my tools sort entries by date, author, keyword, or indeed anything else.  I can then click on the relevant entry to view my notes and the abstract or I can click on the side that has a link to the file to bring up the article's PDF directly. 

However, a key step is creating the full enough entries and filing as I go, even if I mark a fair number of papers with the additional keyword of "to be read".

When I just run across something that might be useful later, I also create the entry in BibDesk with relevant keywords including "to be read" and file the article immediately.  I've experimented with having an electronic pile of articles that would be all filed during a weekly/monthly filing session of a couple hours, but that has almost never worked out for me.  Something is always more immediately interesting or more medium-term important than doing that filing.  Often, I just start reading the articles I'd forgotten I flagged and don't get very far through the pile (much like trying to reorganize my personal library shelves).

Data entry and filing as I go is the only thing I've found that works for having an organized database of articles, especially if I am not in the midst of a targeted literature review and instead just ran across the occasional interesting article.

[fuwafuwa]

I use Zotero extensively. I have a paid subscription. I probably have thousands of entries. I categorize them into collections and subcollections. Some I tag as "review", "extra good", "bad", etc. I also keep the PDFs. I file articles as I come across them, most of which I will skim enough to know if it is relevant and interesting to me. I am in the sciences.

[dismalist]

I have these 3 x 5 cards ... . :-)

[bibliothecula]

I use Zotero. I fill out as much info as I can in the metadata section (if it's not automatically added by the program) as I save clips and articles and so on. Having a backlog of unidentified items is useless. I also tag extensively and organize My Library into sub-libraries by topic.

[VirtualAnimal]

I use Zotero extensively. I have a paid subscription. I probably have thousands of entries. I categorize them into collections and subcollections. Some I tag as "review", "extra good", "bad", etc. I also keep the PDFs. I file articles as I come across them, most of which I will skim enough to know if it is relevant and interesting to me. I am in the sciences.

I like the "extra good" tag idea. Was just recently wondering whether Zotero has a feature to 'star' references like I did in Mendeley before switching over.

[Parasaurolophus]

I don't use any of those. I used to divide my articles up into folders labelled by subfield, but I've found that I basically never use that. All I've used is my laptop's 'search desktop' function, which has sucked since Windows 2010. Hell, since XP, really. So now I just have one big folder for every article I've read, a separate one for all my electronic books, and one last 'to read' folder. I label every file with the author's last name and the article's/book's title.

It doesn't feel especially efficient. It's still hard to search through everything. I'm seriously contemplating learning how to use Zotero or Readcube or whatever, in the hope that it can do most of this work for me.

[teach_write_research]

I am super happy with Zotero. I also use the paid subscription. I've been through Endnote, Mendeley, and RefWorks and Zotero has been the most consistent and easy to use, for me.

I have the pdfs synced on the server and my hard drive. I use collections and subcollections. I'm tempted by tags. I use tags with my macbook and that's a streamlined set of top priority, career, write, current classes, prep, research, service. For Zotero my tag dictionary would be too large at this point. Though tagging sources I used in publications would be a good start.

My collections break down into annotated bibliography topics, current projects, faculty development, teaching development, courses, and then the sad folder "mess" which was the data dump from the aforementioned services.