I have a directory full of research papers I have read or want to read. They are all named [last name of primary author][year][first word in title].{pdf,bib} (there is a PDF and BibTeX file for each publication). This works quite well, as this is the same naming schema that Google Scholar uses in their BibTeX citations.

I want to expand this, though. Some time ago I starting writing a simple GUI application to list these files with their metadata (using Electron and bibtex-parser), but I never quite got it to a state where I actually wanted to use it.

One of my goals with this is to keep all the metadata in a plain text format right beside the files, and not in some database in a third-party application.

Any (pseudo-)academic thing I write, I try to write in Markdown and use pandoc to make nice printables PDFs (via TeX, of course). pandoc-citeproc can read bibliographic references from YAML or BibTeX files, with quite a few metadata fields (see CSL types). Ideally, I can just use a simple text file listing some file names and easily build an bibliography that pandoc can understand.