RSS Feed02 July 2010
Organizing Papers on Linux
As I read papers, I try to keep an up-to-date bibliography. This is party to keep track of what I've read, and partly so that when I'm writing papers or my thesis later, I already have the bibliography ready to go. I used to do this by manually updating a BibTeX file as I went, but this is a bit onerous and not much fun.
After searching a bit, I found Mendeley, which is an online tool and desktop application for managing the papers you read and generating bibiographies as needed. It imports and generates BibTeX, lets you add papers by adding the PDF and letting it search Google Scholar for the title or by using a bookmarklet in your browser, and syncs between the website and the desktop application so you always have your bibliography and a copy of your papers available.
As an added bonus, it lets you hilight and annotate PDFs, which nothing else in Linux does very well. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus the website works anywhere, so it's really quite handy.