Research paper management? - (Dec/22/2012 )

hello everyone,

As a fresh Bachelor graduate, i have built up a collection of paper across multiply discipline (ecology, microbiology, biochem & a lot of random topics ><). i read & annotated some of them and used to rely a on "home-made" database from Excel, so that i search for them when i needed them.

however, the growing size of it start to overwhelm my ability to keep the excel up to date (a large central folder of around a GB: ~1700 paper & a few hundred across folders on the desktop).

i m in trial with “Mendeley” & “papers” as suggested by some of the web; would any of any of you have any other recommendation or other clever ideas on sorting out your research database?

I don't mind software that charges at a reasonable price, but prefer those that do it in a single event base, rather than the monthly bases of Mendeley.

thank you & hope to hear advices soon

You can search the forums, because I think there were discussions about this topic. You can read the rest of subforum

I use Zotero, free Firefox plugin (originally, now also as standalone, but it still requires browser to comfortly add new papers, but I think plugin to Chrome is available).

PS: Moved topic to Reading and Organizing Literature, where it belongs, subforum is bit hidden though.

I chose Mendeley, as you can easily drag and drop the pdfs and the software usually adds all the needed information for the database out of the pdfs, metatdata or the web. For many existing pdfs it seems the most comfortable method. Zotero does the same I guess and I'm not sure what program is better in this.
BTW in Mendeley you pay for additional webspace if you need it (more than 1 GB I think)..I don't use this feature so for me it's free...
wikipedia has a nice comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

I use Jabref, which is a java based program. But I use it primarily because it has nice LaTex output, as I use that for my writing.

readcube, Qiqqa are free; paid are Endnote6; that i use for me...