Article library

It is important to grow and maintain your personal article library. You will especially appreciate having one when writing your own papers and the PhD thesis and needing to quickly find appropriate references. There are several handy software tools for maintaining such a library:

• Mendeley
• Zotero
• Papers
• CiteULike
• ReadCube

Here is a comparison chart for some of them. In terms of features the most powerful at the moment is Mendeley. Its advantages:

• has a browser plug-in for adding articles to your library in one click
• has online web-portal to share and discuss articles with other researchers
• automatically organizes PDFs into folders and renames them following your favorite schema
• full text PDF search for the entire library
• convenient work with several PDFs
• allows to highlight text in PDFs and quickly search through those excerpts
• allows to quickly make bibliographies in LaTeX and Microsoft Word
• provides 2GB of online storage for your library
• free