Managing paper bibliography, reading list

(Meta question: Maybe this community not the right place to ask, as this question is more about academic research, less about software development. But I really don't know where to ask. StackExchange will close this as opinion-based. Quora is only for short questions (asked here). Reddit maybe but not sure where exactly. Twitter maybe, as this would reach some relevant people, but this is again only for short questions.)

So far, when I stumbled upon a nice paper (all the time when I open my Twitter timeline), I put it on a reading list, which is a Google Doc, or leave the paper open in a tab until I get time to read it later. That's how I easily end up with 100s of open tabs. Some of them I read, and then I also put them in other Google Docs for some specific research field which I work on where it relates to. I also have a huge Bibtex file which I edit by hand, where I put papers in which I cite in own papers. I further have some scripts which organize, unify and deduplicate entries in that Bibtex file.

Google Doc is online, and the Bibtex file in some Git repo, so everything is properly synchronized. This is an important requirement.

However, it doesn't scale well, and is annoying to organize. I have all these tabs open because it is way too complicated to open the Google Doc and put it in there for potential later read, maybe with some note where I found it or why I think it is relevant for me. Then sometimes each month I go through all these tabs and put it into the Google Doc, which is pretty annoying.

So now I considered to use Zotero. But this lacks a lot of what I do currently, e.g. running my scripts to unify entries. I saw that there is a plugin architecture, and the Zotero-better-bibtex plugin, and a Python script using that debug bridge. So probably I can use that as a base to make my existing scripts work. But not sure if I should work on that now. I also wonder a bit that I still need to put so much own work into it, and how other people are doing this.

Also, importing a paper in Zotero is still not so easy. E.g. when I have some Arxiv page open, ideally I want to do a single click to import it. But now I need to click the "export as bibtex" button, copy that into clipboard, then import that in Zotero, and then currently manually edit the entry to be consistent. Edit I just needed a reload of the Arxiv page after I enabled the Chrome extension. After that, the import properly works now with a single click, which is nice. It still might need some post-editing, e.g. changing "Journal article" to "Report", and maybe other things.

Maybe I have not found the right plugins yet. Or maybe there are also better solutions than Zotero. Or maybe I do things wrong. I would just like to know how others are doing this.

Comments

[Benjioe]

What features do you need ?

I see only two main features :

• Save some url in an online reading list => for that, I just use browser's bookmarks
• Save article content with "some note where I found it or why I think it is relevant for me" => I know that's Microsoft Onenote can be configure to add origin url when you past a content.