Is there a way to easily rename an academic pdf to author names+year+title?

[Simfish]

I did try using Zotero (as suggested from http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-way-to-easily-rename-an-academic-pdf-to-author-names+year+title), but it wasn't able to find names for half of my PDF files.

 

[Choppy]

You mean as opposed to right click on the file, rename, and type in whatever you want the file to be called?

 

[Simfish]

Yes true

 

[Ocasta]

Adobe Bridge. Batch rename.

 

[eri]

If you download Mendeley (free for all OS) you can easily search and sort your papers by year, authors, title, keywords, and more.

 

[hadsed]

You could write a script that goes into the file, write some regular expressions to figure out what the author/title/whatever really is, then simply rename the file to those variables. I think it's somewhat straightforward, although I'll be honest I'm not entirely sure how easy it would be to read a PDF document. There must be some Python libraries to do that for you though. It's worth looking into I think.

EDIT: There's something called bibtex that my professor recommended to me once to store all of the papers I wanted to. I think the system is largely already in place, so probably my above comment wouldn't be the best use of your time.