The way I work with Bookends – which I consider to be the best of the presently available managers, but others may well disagree – is that I keep all my PDFs of articles and so forth in an Attachments folder in iCloud. I leave Bookends to look after this, because it can rename attachments according to a scheme that you devise (I use main author, year, and title). So if you conduct an online search and find a pdf of an article that you can download, and it is called Xqf53.pdf, or something like that, Bookends can download it, put it in the attachments folder, and rename it for you.
The attachments folder is indexed by DEVONthink, so all the information is available for search in that application. I believe this is a fairly common approach.
Bear in mind that you can drag items from Bookends into Tinderbox, and it will bring across all the information from the entry and make the note in Tinderbox into a reference.
Sorry for the slightly sketchy description, but I hope you get the drift.
FWIW, I tend to keep filename PDFs of papers I download from the canonical source (i.e. the publisher) in the original form. Why? Sure, your ref manager can rename them, but—Why? Well, that’s why you have a reference manager. It will open the reference’s attached asset (e.g. a PDF of the paper). Renaming the PDF just adds a degree of obfuscation (and possible breakage). It’s a bit like putting your cash in a box in the bank’s vault and then devising your own system for tracking all the dollar bills in the box - spoiler, they come with a UID. I hate to labour a point, but one of the upsides of hypermedia is the concept of a canonical source; giving it an (unneeded) alias smacks of hubris and a self-inflicted point of unwanted failure.
Indeed, in the post-Web era, it seems we’ve rather forgotten the interesting lessons the hypertext pioneers worked out for us. Tinderbox is many things to many people, but one of its joys for me is it retains many interesting things the Web-tech fok kicked inot the long grass. Of course, YMMV.
But on a serious note, Mark – I don’t understand how naming a pdf with the author’s name, the date of publication, and the title, amounts to obfuscation. I use the method precisely because it gives me clarity. Perhaps you don’t download pdfs which have filenames that only consist of numbers. And I suspect we use our bibliographic managers differently. I almost never work in Bookends. For me it is just the tool that will format the citations and bibliography when I have finished. Everything else I do in other programs, and that is when I prefer to glance at the filename of the the pdf and not see a string of numbers. But each to their own, of course!
@MartinBoycott-Brown, thesis done - chapeau! As to your perfectly clear question, if I were opening the PDFs by visual inspection of the filename then, I’d agree that a more representation filename would help. But, for me, one of the whole points of my reference manager is to find and open references. Why do I keep the original filename, which as you note is often a seemingly meaningless* string of numbers? For me, it is about provenance. Early on, I found myself trying to triage apparent duplicates and discovered that keeping the original filename—especially if direct from the publisher’s library—made it much easier to check I had a single canonical copy of the document.
* After a while I noticed that these ‘meaningless’ names are’t that and that they encode a DOI or publisher’s UID, which again helps with provenance.
No rule is all-encompassing: sometimes the files arrives as ‘download.pdf’ and I’ll rename it. But I don’t rename docs just to give them a more ‘readable’ name.
I too, don’t ‘work’ in Bookends but it is the primary index of my research materials (excepting 00s of Wikipedia references, which arise from my study of that site). Early on in my research I was linking to the docs from other apps, but found in time it was better to simply use the BE to open the docs.
Still, as your question shows, style vary. I didn’t mean to be proscriptive. I’d still recommend that at the outset of research that one considers issues like this (i.e. here, the renaming reference materials) so that one does it for a reason rather than because it looks tidy or simply because some app offers to do that for one. My ‘your mileage may vary’ in my last post wasn’t being sarcastic.
Thank you! But it was about eight years ago, so it has faded into the background a bit.
Since we are discussing workflows and methods, perhaps it would not be out of place to extend this a bit.
It is possible that one of the reasons why I use my method is that I have been doing it for longer, and it predates some of the opportunities that have been made possible by new software and the rise of the Internet. I first started using this method (or basically the same) in about 1993, when I started researching for a book (at that time I was using EndNote, Ms Word 5 and Filemaker Pro on a PowerBook 180 – I actually found it in the loft a couple of weeks ago, to my surprise). The method worked for a fairly big book, which I think had about 340 references by the end, though I think I had found about 600 – in around six different languages. Some of this was archival material, some were books, maps, articles, and there were lots of transcriptions and translations, which I had to name myself, but link to the reference in EndNote. No DOIs in those days. This methodology also worked for a chapter for a book, and I stuck to it for my PhD some years later (by which time a lot had changed for researchers, but I still did a lot of work in archives, taking photographs of a lot of material).
By this time, the most important tool for keeping track of everything was DEVONthink. I never opened a PDF in Bookends, nor searched for it using that program because I had my whole attachment folder indexed by DEVONthink. So I think my method – if I dare call it that, because it still feels fairly unstable – is more due to working in DEVONthink than it is to Bookends. If I found a source that was relevant to chapter 2, say, I just replicated it into the DEVONthink folder for chapter 2. And this was a major reason for renaming the PDFs – I was always looking at them in DEVONthink, so being able to see author and title in the filename was useful to me. The provenance was not quite irrelevant, but something I could find out easily if I wanted – which I almost never did. Different kind of work requires attention to different things. And of course, one of the great things about DEVONthink (to me) is that it will show you if there is a duplicate of your file in your database. Even if it has a completely different filename, if the content is the same it will show as a duplicate.
At the moment I am in a kind of transition, because I am trying to do more work in Tinderbox. I am not finding it easy to work out how to do things. Trying to fit it in after around twenty-six years of doing things another way is demanding more adaptability than I might be able to summon. I will hope for the best.
Thanks for everything you contribute to this forum. I think a lot of us would be even more lost without it.
