How do people organize their research?

Fairly broad question, but I am interested in learning how people keep their ideas, insights they learn from papers, readings, etc and everything else that goes into research organized?

What kind of tools work well for you and you feel thankful for using over the years?

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For organizing papers, Mendeley is great, and they have a Word add-in that can insert citations and generate a formatted bibliography, with support for different journal formats. Disclaimer: I am unaffiliated with Mendeley, it’s just great

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I use Mendeley but many a times it detects wrong metadata associated with a paper and then it gets very annoying.

Real researchers organize research into raw bib files and use a plain text editor.

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no joke that is actually how i do it (well texshop…). it makes you strong with the power of semantic organization

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Thanks to @suhail for pointing this to me:

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I use a directory with all of the papers with a regular naming scheme: year_title.pdf

this allows you to scroll through the papers as time went on.

Then I write a summary and/or review of each paper after I’ve read it, and keep that in some sort of document, like a Markdown file.

Lately I’ve been using github issues to track which papers have been reviewed.

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Big text file,
Each line is specially formatted to describe paper and their conference.
This file also accompanied with some bash scripts for searching, transforming into bib, making notes for certain paper, etc.

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