Thread by @raulpacheco

Quick micro-thread on PDF and physical paper organizing. Despite my retweeting Dr. Rebecca Stone @stone_prof in self-deprecating jest, for the most part (95%), my printed papers and online PDFs are usually very organized. I'll tweet the two blog posts I wrote on this topic.

@stone_prof There is a reason why I *sometimes* (not often) download the same PDF twice (or three times!) - I have sub-folders for the articles/chapters/books I write, with a sub-sub-folder for PDFs associated with said chapter, as shown below. I do this to keep the citations list clear.

@stone_prof A lot of people have suggested to me that I should just have ONE big PDF library from where to draw (that's the Mendeley approach, I think Zotero too, and I used to do that while I was doing my PhD). As a grad student, I believed in that approach. As a professor, not so much.

@stone_prof I work across disciplines and topics. So I like to have clear delimitations (boxes, if you will) for PDFs and for journal articles. I usually store them by topic (Waste Theory, Informality, Comparative Politics, Research Methods, Ethnography). I am well aware that this is also...

... problematic because the same article may cross different topics. A paper on informal waste picking in Mexico may be stored under "Waste Pickers", "Mexican Waste Governance", "Informality Theory".

I *get* this.

The "PDFs sub-folder for each paper" approach works for me...

... most of the time, except when I'm coming back to a topic I haven't worked in for a while.

You can tell me all you want about search functions, tags and so on. My experience with GMail, Google Scholar, Evernote, Mendeley and MySQL tells me that no search function is perfect.

For my doctoral dissertation I used EndNote and I did have one single PDF library. It seemed, to me, normal: I was writing a full-fledged book.

For my books, I am using a single library. It feels wrong to dump stuff that I normally would separate in neat bins into a single one.

This is why personalities matter when you provide (or listen to) advice on academic life:

Your personality is entirely different from mine.

My reluctance to believe in search functions makes storing stuff in boxes (or PDFs or magazine holders) easier for me. Also...

For example, if I want to find a PDF and use Windows 10 search functions, IT DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY.

I use an emulator of Windows 7 in my laptop so that I can find PDFs quickly.

For those interested, here's how I store PDFs and how I file articles (links in next tweet)

Organizing PDFs raulpacheco.org/2015/09/organi…

Organizing books and journal articles (physically)
raulpacheco.org/2015/09/organi…

I'll continue searching for the right approach, but for now, this is how I work. Also, when I find a repeated article/PDF in Mendeley, I merge all versions.

</end thread>

Right after finishing the thread I remembered I didn't say why as a professor now I don't believe in the full PDF library approach:

I have graduate students and colleagues. Some of them ask me "hey, can you recommend a good article on waste theory, or on bottled water?"

The full PDF library approach would have me searching either in the big 10,000 PDFs folder, or doing search functions with Boolean operators in Mendeley. Not super efficient.

So, I choose to create separate bins (folders) so I can store all articles related to one topic.

When you ask me "can you recommend a good ethnography text?" I go into my "Ethnography" folder and check what I've saved there.

When you ask me "what are the top 5 methods in comparative politics articles I should read?", I look into my "Methods in Comparative Politics" folder.

Ok, now I REALLY should go. </end thread, for realz>