Hello! I am trying to compile the bibliography for 3 chapters I have already written and I am getting crazyy over here!! I have no idea from bibliography softwares, I used to do it manually so far, but at this stage it's just sooo timeconsuming! Does anyone know if there is any kind of software by which you can enter a word and it can crossreference all your pdf files and find the pdf in which the word is mentioned?

Thanks in advance

(P.S. Such a huge mistake writting 3 chapters and then trying to compile the bibliography!!)

If I understand correctly what you are asking, windows search might do the job for you....

At least this is what I am doing! Type a word in search and then search everything. Then search contents of files (or something like that)...
You should get a list of files that have the word you searched in them....

I've tried to do it this way, I've changed the search options/settings/indexing a lot of times, but it still doesn't work :-(
Thank you for the info though :-)

Mendeley is a free reference management software which can also store your pdf files and allows you to annotate them. You can also enter a search term and it will bring up all occurences of that word or phrase in all of your papers (they all have to be in Mendeley first though). You can also use Mendeley with Word to insert citations and generate bibliographies. It's really easy to use, I figured it all out within half an hour and it will save you so much time. There are other reference management packages available but this is the only one that I've used.

www.mendeley.com

Thank you very much for the advice! I'll give it a go :-)

Refworks, Endnote, Zotero...

Give Qiqqa (pronounced "quicker") a try. It is Windows software that allows you to full text search your PDFs, annotate and highlight them, and then summarise your annotations in a single annotations report. It also finds the themes across your PDFs and allows you to explore these themes visually in a brainstorm. Qiqqa automates writing up your bibliography in Word in over 2000 journal styles. It even suggests what you might want to be citing as you type. www.qiqqa.com