Academic Papers Template
Organize research papers, journal articles, and academic documents using citation-friendly naming with author, year, and topic. Perfect for researchers, students, and academics.
{author}_{year}_{title}_{source}Template Fields
| Field | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
{author} AI | First author's last name (or "et-al" for multiple) | smith, johnson-et-al |
{year} AI | Publication year | 2024, 2023 |
{title} AI | Shortened paper title | machine-learning-review |
{source} AI Optional | Journal or conference name | nature, ieee, arxiv |
Citation-Friendly Format. This naming pattern follows academic citation conventions (Author, Year), making it easy to locate papers when writing references and building bibliographies.
How It Works
- 1
Extract author names
AI identifies the first author from the paper header, using "et-al" for multiple authors.
- 2
Find publication year
Locates the publication or copyright year from the document.
- 3
Generate short title
Creates a condensed, meaningful title from the full paper title.
- 4
Identify source
Extracts journal name, conference name, or repository (arXiv, etc.).
Examples
| Original file | Renamed to |
|---|---|
paper(1).pdf | smith_2024_machine-learning-healthcare_nature.pdf |
download.pdf | johnson-et-al_2023_quantum-computing-advances_ieee.pdf |
2401.12345.pdf | chen_2024_transformer-architecture_arxiv.pdf |
article_final.pdf | patel_2023_climate-model-analysis_science.pdf |
Who Is This For?
| Who | How they use it |
|---|---|
| PhD Students | Manage literature review collections |
| Researchers | Organize reference libraries |
| Professors | Maintain teaching materials |
| Librarians | Catalog digital archives |
Why Naming Matters
Research collections grow to hundreds of files quickly, and generic names like paper(1).pdf or download.pdf make it impossible to find what you need without opening files one by one. Citation-format naming (Author_Year_Title) mirrors how researchers already think about and cite papers, searching for "smith_2024" retrieves the right file instantly.
Consistent naming also enables folder-level sorting that matches how you work. All papers by a given author, all papers published in 2024, or all papers from a specific journal naturally group together in an alphabetically sorted directory. This makes both manual browsing and automated scripting (e.g. building a bibliography from filenames) far more reliable.
Including the source abbreviation, nature, ieee, arxiv, adds instant credibility filtering. When scanning a folder for peer-reviewed sources versus preprints, the source field does the work without opening a single file.
Alternate Patterns
The default pattern covers most journal articles. For other academic document types, these variants work better:
Conference papers (with venue)
{author}_{year}_{title}_{venue}e.g. lecun_1998_gradient-based-learning_icml.pdf
Dissertation or thesis
{year}_{author}_{institution}_{degree}-thesise.g. 2023_chen_mit_phd-thesis.pdf
Preprint with arXiv ID
{author}_{year}_{title}_arxiv-{id}e.g. vaswani_2017_attention-is-all-you-need_arxiv-1706.03762.pdf
Best Practices
- 1
Standardize the "et-al" threshold
Decide up front: use "et-al" for 3 or more authors. Mixing "smith-jones" (two authors) with "smith-et-al" (three) causes inconsistency when sorting.
- 2
Keep the title slug to 5 words or fewer
Long title slugs are hard to scan in a file list. "machine-learning-healthcare" is better than "machine-learning-approaches-for-early-detection-in-healthcare-settings".
- 3
Use journal abbreviations, not full names
"nature" rather than "nature-medicine-international-journal", "ieee" rather than "ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks". Short forms are scannable and unambiguous.
- 4
Strip diacritics from author names
Convert "Müller" to "muller" and "Ångström" to "angstrom". Diacritics cause sorting inconsistencies across operating systems and break CLI tools that expect ASCII filenames.
- 5
Use 4-digit publication year only
Do not append a month to the year field. Publication month is rarely needed for citation purposes and adds noise. If you need month granularity, add it as a separate optional field.
- 6
For working papers and preprints, use the submission year
If a paper lacks a formal publication date, use the arXiv submission year or the year on the manuscript cover page. Never leave the year blank in the filename.
Frequently Asked Questions
AI looks for copyright notices, submission dates, and "received" dates embedded in the document. If none are found, the year field is left blank. You’ll see this in the rename preview before confirming, and can deselect that file if you’d rather not rename it yet.
Yes, use a pattern like {author}_{year}_{title}_{edition} and set edition as an optional field. For example: russell_2020_artificial-intelligence_4th-ed.pdf. FilesDesk will extract the edition number from the cover page or title page.
FilesDesk detects filename collisions before writing and automatically appends a counter suffix (_2) to avoid overwriting files. You will see the collision flagged in the rename preview.
Yes, OCR mode extracts text from scanned documents before applying the AI naming logic. Enable OCR in the template settings for best results on older scanned papers or photocopied journal articles.
Related
Download FilesDesk for Mac or Windows. Bring order to your academic paper collection.