scholar-rename

an interactive pdf-renamer tool.

[sudo] gem install scholar-rename

you'll also need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

for macOS, you can install w/ brew:

brew install pkg-config poppler

for Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

renames a pdf file to author-title-year.pdf or other formats based on your selection. academic people may find it useful for renaming pdfs that come in arbitrarily named file formats. it helps when searching for a specific pdf and when labeling pdfs.

by default, scholar-rename queries the Semantic Scholar Graph API using the extracted pdf text to suggest an authoritative title/author/year. you'll be asked to confirm the match (auto-accepted when using --auto). if there's no internet connection, the api times out, or no match is found, scholar-rename falls back to its original manual line-picking flow -- nothing ever crashes or hangs waiting on the network. use --no-lookup to skip the network step entirely (useful when offline, batch-renaming many files, or avoiding the api's rate limits).