How to organise my Zotero Collections (or Papers/Mendeley etc.)

jyanscole74

I am struggling how to organise my zotero library. Do you simply put all the papers you've downloaded into it, or do you only do this one by one, as to make sure that you've read every single paper? I tried the former approach first, but it quickly became cluttered. At the same time I'm worried I will be forgetting about certain pdfs I've downloaded etc.

Another question regards the collections you guys create. I have first tried to order everything by topic, but this quickly became very large. Then I thought maybe I should create folder for each paper I am intending to write, and then put everything I read for that paper into that folder. Is this the usual approach people follow? My problem with this is that I don't know where to put papers that I don't read for a certain paper I want to write, but don't want to lose track of. Or papers which I do not end up referencing in my paper -do you still keep those in there, or how do you handle things like that?

bwiernik

1) everything I read (papers, blogs, web pages) goes into my library. Papers it hope to read go there too. I don’t worry too much about organizing/clutter. It’s better to have something there and be searchable than to not have it, especially if the alternative is having two separate collections of papers lying around. You might consider adding a colored tag for “unread” status if you want to track that.

2) I don’t use collections/folders for topics. That’s too unwieldy for me. Instead, I reserve folders for projects—papers relevant for a specific paper, class, etc. For topics, I use tags.