Re: [O] managing articles in my personal library, and their citational material, using org mode instead of bibtex

[Ian Barton]

On 19/11/13 01:40, Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
> Not sure "citational" is even a word, but hopefully it conveys my meaning!
>
> I've been using LaTeX for academic writing and reading for quite some
> time, with emacs as my editor. I'm pretty familiar with managing a .bib
> file containing all the references I've collected, and using it in LaTeX
> \cite commands.
>
> I've come to org-mode more recently. I'm trying to imagine how I might
> use it to manage my "personal library." I have a directory full of pdf
> files, each a downloaded article. Some articles I reference in papers I
> write; others I just read and want to keep.  I also have a .bib file
> where I put the citational material for all those articles. Whenever I
> download an article, I add its entry to my .bib file. I tend to manage
> this with JabRef because it searches Medline so easily, but I also will
> edit the .bib file directly when necessary.
>
> I like the idea of an org file containing the citational information
> (authors, title, journal, etc)  *plus* links to the pdfs on my hard
> drive, or on the internet. I could also include my notes about the
> articles. But what would that org file look like? How do I insert a
> reference to an article into the org file which contains the article I
> am writing?
>
> I'd be grateful for any explanations, or links to tutorials.

Can't help with managing the citations in org, as the last time I had to 
do this I was using a card index file:)

However, to address your other questions one way of doing this would be 
to create an org file with a heading for each article:

* Article 1.
Here are some notes.

* Article 2
My notes

You can create hyperlinks to each article from org. See 
http://orgmode.org/org.html#Hyperlinks for more detailed information.

However, you should perhaps decide first how you might structure your 
org file. You might want to group articles under an author heading, or 
perhaps more likely by subject area, with a sub heading for each article 
under the main heading.

You may also want to tag each article. See 
http://orgmode.org/org.html#Tags Org lets you quickly narrow your view 
of an org file so that you are only seeing headings with specific tags.

Ian.