Organizing and Databasing Papers/Science Articles

[FortranMan]

I'm beginning to build a large collection of papers for my research and it is getting bewildering trying to navigate them and collect their citation information. Right now I keep making a text file in each directory with the citation information of each paper and their file name. Is their a database program that can run on a flash drive or a computer to organize my papers and that I can search through? Does bibtex do something similar?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Microsoft Access would be just fine for you.

 

[FortranMan]

Thanks Greg, but does anyone know of any free alternatives?

 

[NeoDevin]

http://www.zotero.org/"

Edited to add: Allows you to manage all your references, including pdfs of the papers, links to webpages, fully searchable, and organized by "collections" and tags. Integrates with MS Word and OpenOffice.org to automate production of bibliographies. Also automates searching for books/papers in your university library, and automates logging into journal websites through your library proxy. Works best with Firefox, but I think they have chrome integration now.