Hi folks,

I was wondering if people could recommend methods of handling the huge number of pdfs/reading that we do for a PhD in a systematic way. I'm finding I'm amassing huge archives of pdfs for various articles, and losing track of what I've read, what was useful in what article and so. I've experimented with simple highlighting articles, but this has cross-computer issues; printing them all in small A5 booklets, but that becomes unwieldy even at the smaller size.

What systems have you guys used/developed to handle literature?

I'd strongly recommend getting the hang of at least one bibliographic software package (e.g. Reference Manager, Endnote, Mendeley, Zotero). Not only will it make it massively easier to insert citations/footnotes into your work, most have additional functions like pdf annotation or the ability to tag/file your papers into collections.

I use Mendeley and find it pretty good, but I've also used Endnote and Reference Manager in the past for inserting citations. They all have their flaws, but it's worth using one anyway.

It might also solve your cross-computer issues - Mendeley desktop can be synced across devices.

I would suggest you to start using Mendeley.
the tutorial can be found here,

That's great. Just started giving it a whirl and it looks like just the sort of thing I need. Thanks!

For referencing during my MSc, I used Refworks -

Mendeley is good for storage and note taking.
You can set up a 'watch' file on your PC and any files you save to it will automatically go to Mendeley, you can then set up folders to organise your files.
When synthesising the literature Mendeley is great as you can have numerous PDFs open at any one time and write across them all finding comparisions and differences.
You can type a key work in the search bar and it will search all your documents for it.
You can search literature from scratch in their search bar or it will also search for related articles to ones you have.
Only thing, be careful with using it for citations as it sometimes gets them wrong but it will ask you to check the citation and you can ammend it to show the correct one.

:)