Research & Study

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.

Naming Pattern {author}_{year}_{title}_{source}

Template Fields

FieldDescriptionExample
{author}AIFirst author's last name (or "et-al" for multiple)smith, johnson-et-al
{year}AIPublication year2024, 2023
{title}AIShortened paper titlemachine-learning-review
{source}AIOptionalJournal or conference namenature, 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. 1Extract author names - AI identifies the first author from the paper header, using "et-al" for multiple authors.
  2. 2Find publication year - Locates the publication or copyright year from the document.
  3. 3Generate short title - Creates a condensed, meaningful title from the full paper title.
  4. 4Identify source - Extracts journal name, conference name, or repository (arXiv, etc.).

Examples

Before & After Renaming

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?

GraduationCap

PhD Students

Manage literature review collections

Microscope

Researchers

Organize reference libraries

BookOpen

Professors

Maintain teaching materials

Library

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}-thesis

e.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. 1Standardize 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. 2Keep 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. 3Use 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. 4Strip 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. 5Use 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. 6For 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

What if the paper has no visible publication year?

AI looks for copyright notices, submission dates, and "received" dates embedded in the document. If none are found, the year field is left blank so you can fill it in during the rename preview before confirming.

Can I use this for textbooks, not just papers?

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.

How does it handle papers with identical author/year/title slugs?

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.

Does it work for scanned PDFs without embedded text?

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.

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