I save the pdfs in a folder and when I need the bibtex reference I grab it from Google Scholar… maybe I should check out Zotero haha
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I used to use Mendeley, tried switching to Zotero because Elsevier.
Look and feel seem much more native than with Mendeley, but other than that it’s been kind of a mess. Trying to import things left me with this weird hierarchy, with papers attached to the wrong citation. And the single feature I use most, full text search, doesn’t seem to work at all. It often tells me there’s no match, even in cases where I know that’s not right.
The whole thing has been really frustrating
For what it’s worth, I use Zotero and haven’t had problems with full-text search.
I no longer digitally organize papers, I have a laser printer and print out whatever I find important. In the past I experimented with Jabref and other tools, but none of them satisfy me. Someday I want to make my own tool based on VerTeX.jl for references, as I discussed before
I’ve used refworks and recently tried endnote, all because of collaboration on papers. Can’t get over how much easier Zotero is.
@mbaz did you have to do anything special to set things up? I had hoped to just point it at a directory of pdfs and let it work through them. But it seemed to require selecting a small subset at a time and dragging documents in manually. And I’m not sure why search isn’t working, but the whole thing is only a small benefit (for citations) without it.
I don’t recall having to do anything. I just re-read the documentation (searching [Zotero Documentation]) and I found that about half my PDF files were not indexed. I rebuilt the index and now most of the files are indexed. The ones that are missing might be scanned PDFs that don’t contain any actual text. I hope this helps – let me know if you want me to run any tests on my side.
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the AUR version works great for me on Arch.
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I use my brain and a nesting of directories with *.pdfs. Not the most satisfactory answer, but it’s honest.
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I used to do that, but my brain overflows pretty easily these days (and it’s only getting worse over time 
)
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If you are using Zotero, don’t miss ZotFile, which makes it easy to add PDF attachments to items, and also automatically renames/moves them into the location of your choice. I use this to put all my downloaded PDFs into a “papers” folder on Google Drive. It also promises to sync PDFs and annotations to/from iOS/Android.
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I’m using Zotero and Jabref for bibliography, none is perfect but at least they work and are free. If you want to use it for Latex I think Jabref works better.
I would like to use EndNote but it’s absurdly expensive.
You could try the Emacs solution using Spacemacs. It uses Evil, which is like VIM build in Emacs. You can still use VIM for everything else, although Emacs is a superb Latex editor itself (setup is a breeze with Spacemacs). You will also get the awesome org-mode, and generally very good support via Spacemacs gitter. If you will try, then switch to the develop branch immediately. I think it is really worth it to check it out. I switched myself from VIM to Spacemacs almost completely, but I still have VIM available.