Best way to organize bibliography? - Please share your way of organization and indexing

Hi,

I just decided to organise my bibliography in a better way.

So far, I was doing that outside of Zotero. I was naming my PDFs as -
and creating folders and subdirectories as categories and putting them in. However, the problem is that sometimes an article belonged to more than one category, so I had to copy and paste the file to many locations. Apart from creating clutter, if I wanted to put an annotation or a comment to a PDF, I would have to then update all the other copies.

The reason I was not doing that with Zotero, is that sometimes I need to search within PDFs. I use a linux tool called Recoll, which lets you search the full text within PDFs.

So now I've decided to use Zotero, create my directories and subdirectories tree and start putting the articles in one or more directories, but this time, I also use the linux tool 'pdftotext' to convert the whole pdf to text, and then I copy-paste it as a note to the zotero entry. This allows me to also search within full texts.

Is there a better/easier way to do this? What is your approach to this?
  • See the part about "PDF Full-Text Indexing":
    https://www.zotero.org/support/searching
  • edited October 22, 2019
    Hi @damnation thanks for the comment.

    Can I link my PDFs on one computer, extract the text, and on another computer sync the full text only, and not the PDF?

    Moreover, I'm not liking the way that Zotero is indexing the PDFs. Even if I link the pdf in my computer, it won't use that file, instead it will re-copy it to another place. So again the same problem, if I make anotations to the PDF I have in my computer folder, the Zotero PDF will not get updated
Sign In or Register to comment.