In the past, I have experimented with a number of OS X apps to keep track of journal (and other) articles. But in the end, I always end up going back to regular old folders and files. I find there is too much overhead in using other apps dedicated to the purpose of keeping track of articles. So, I have a regular old folder called “papers” that I store on Dropbox, and then inside there, I have a hierarchy of categories like “theory” and “HCI”, etc, and sometimes folders for sub-categories inside those.

Part of the greatness of OS X is Spotlight searching, which works pretty well to find papers containing text of interest. That said, the default spotlight search does contain quite a bit of noise. For example, by default it shows you only the top few papers, it contains other things like images and irrelevant file types, and searches your entire hard drive rather than only journal articles. Naturally, for every search I would click “see all” to display the full list of matches, and then I would sort by type and go through every matching PDF file.

After using a Mac for over 5 years and seeing smart folders on the sidebar of the Finder, I just recently thought of making a smart folder for journal papers, and it is much more useful than I would have guessed. Essentially, smart folders are like “saved searches”, but it’s even better, because I did not realize that you can modify the searches on the fly.

First, I will describe what it looks like and how it acts. On the sidebar of Finder, I now have an entry called “PDF Papers”. If you click it, it lists every paper (pdf file) contained in my “papers” folder. That is, it shows every pdf file anywhere inside a folder contained in the “papers” folder. It sort of flattens the hierarchy within the “papers” folder.

But, you can also type in the search bar at the top of the window to filter the papers listed by the text you type (it filters with text inside the files, and not just the filenames). This is great for me because by default it only includes stuff in the “papers” folder (removing stuff that isn’t journal articles, such as drafts of papers I’ve written, which always provide lots of noise in my Spotlight searches), and it doesn’t show other file types, or only show me the “top 3” matches.

To add this, in the Finder, go to your “papers” folder, select “Find” from the “File” menu, set it to search in your “papers” folder as opposed to your whole Mac, set the kind to only include PDFs, set it to search “contents” instead of file names, and then “save” the search. Voila - it’s on your Finder sidebar.

I’m always surprised when my favourite solution has been staring me in the face for such a long time.