How do you manage your papers in your computer [closed]

Question

So, basically, how do you do to file your digital papers and articles; so that you can find them quickly. Do you make specific folders by subject, what should you name your files, etc.

Answer 1

Use whatever you are most comfortable with. If you usually file by author than using someone else organization scheme by title wouldn't make sense to you. Also how many layers of folders do you want. You could organize by author with 26 folders (a to z) or you could first have topic, then author by letter, then maybe even more subfolders.

It also depends on what type of papers. If you have many that are across multiple disciplines then it wouldn't be as helpful to organize them by a single topic.

The largest piece of advice I can give is to give the papers good names. For example author - year - name. That way if you run out of room you still have the author name (maybe just the main author's last name), the date and the beginning of the title. This way you can open either your C drive or a superfolder you know contains the paper you want and search by the author, year or a portion of the title.