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Comment by pkrumins | Hacker News Reader

One lesson academics should learn: pdf-naming-skills.pdf.

I've been collecting interesting scientific papers and publications since early 2000 (I've a collection of 10,000 or so) and I've not yet seen a single academic, not even a computer scientist, who understands how to name your documents right so that when I download them I could quickly find them. I've to rename every single pdf. It's infuriating.

Someone should teach academics an SEO course.

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Even worse: instead of having a discussion on college mathematics pedagogy and differential equations, you decided this was the most relevant thing to discuss, made even more totally irrelevant by the fact that 1) it's a futile suggestion, 2) the original author is dead, and 3) you haven't heard of full-text search or file renaming.

I remember writing a little script in Python that used a pdf library to try to grab the title from inside the pdf and rename the file. It worked half of the time. I too have too many pdfs and it's annoying to have to rename every single one of them.

What's wrong with any of the pieces of reference management software out there? I use Endnote, others may have different preferences. Reference management and document retrieval is a problem that popped up together with the first library, and library classification has evolved alongside. I wouldn't say it's a solved problem, but it's a known problem with known attempts at solution. Attempting to roll your own is so reminiscent of OpenSSL, and they keep getting into trouble with their habit of inventing the wheel.

Everybody has a different system, and why should they standardize on yours?

What kind of a system is surname.pdf, New-Pub_New2new.pdf, USENIX_.PDF, and Paper.pdf.

I like to say: Show me how you organize your files, and I'll tell you how good of a computer user you are.

How good of a computer user do you have to be to sort by modified date? :P

Lots of things can touch modification date.

It's ironic, because professors and instructors often ask their students to name their research papers, essays, and projects with a well-defined, searchable naming scheme.

surname.pdf is almost certainly a half-hearted (because that is all that is possible) way to fit into someone else's naming scheme. Otherwise, it would be cv.pdf, application.pdf, etc. because those are the file names that make sense on my computer.

What you don't see is the directory structure that that file lives in, which gives almost all the necessary information.

~/work/projects/reinventwheel/paper/manuscript.pdf should and does contain more information than "manuscript.pdf". If you're not renaming files when you get them and putting them in the correct context on your machine, I would say it is you that is doing it wrong.

I also got tired of organizing papers and websites (various articles I print to pdf), I just throw it all into Mendeley Desktop now and apply my own tags and so some minor modifications on author/title. I go with the "last name - year - title" naming and this works well enough for me.

I have an order of magnitude fewer docs that you; I can't imagine hand organizing that many!

you're welcome :)

http://pgbovine.net/publications.htm

this is something i try to do for all my papers, although of course people will still need to manually re-name to fit their own conventions. but at least it's better than Guo.pdf

The academic equivalent of the dreaded "resume.pdf".

When you download you have the option to pick a name (and not use the data provided by content-disposition)

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