Scientific Paper Rename (sci-paper-rename)

Tired of messy filenames for all your scientific papers? sci-paper-rename is here to help! This handy command-line tool automatically renames your PDFs using their actual paper titles — no more guesswork or manual renaming.

Just run it on your folder of papers, and watch it tidy up your files with neat, meaningful names. Easy, fast, and stress-free!

Introduction

Scientific Paper Rename (or sci-paper-rename, for short) is a command-line tool that makes organizing your scientific papers a breeze. It scans each PDF to find the paper’s title and then renames the file to match — so your folders stay neat and easy to navigate.

Approach

sci-paper-rename looks for the title in two places:

1. PDF Metadata: If the PDF was carefully created, the title might be stored in its metadata.
2. Largest Font on First Page: If metadata is unavailable or unreliable, the tool scans the first page of the paper, looking for a sentence with the largest font size, assuming it's the title.

If both methods succeed, the user is prompted to choose which title to use.

Dependencies

The current version depends on Python 3.11.6 and PyMuPDF 1.26.0. Please make sure to have them installed before running the package!

If your version doesn't match, use pyenv to install Python version 3.11.6.

Installation

You can install sci-paper-rename easily with pip:

From PyPI

pip install sci-paper-rename

From GitHub repository (latest development version)

pip install git+https://github.com/heversonbr/sci-paper-rename.git

Or, if you prefer to install locally after cloning

git clone https://github.com/heversonbr/sci-paper-rename.git
cd sci-paper-rename
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install .

Usage

After installation, use the tool from the command line.

Rename all files in a directory

python3 sci-paper-rename.py </path/to/target_directory>

Rename a single PDF file

sci-paper-rename /path/to/specific-paper.pdf

Show help message

sci-paper-rename --help