In order to keep an overview of my references and also to quickly add them to publications, I add references that I find useful to the bibliography manager BibDesk. To add a paper, I would copy the BibTeX code on ADS into BibDesk and then link the PDF so that it can be easily retrieved later. I have set up BibDesk such that it uses simple cite codes (such as burtscher2015) and uses these codes also as the file name of the PDF. This way I can easily open the PDF from any application by activating Spotlight and typing in the cite code.

This “workflow” has served me well so far, but now I found a tool that makes this even more streamlined. The “Service” (i.e. a context-menu extension for Mac OS X) ADS to BibDesk allows to add a paper to BibDesk by simply right clicking on the bib code (among many other ways of ingesting references). It is essentially a Python script with a Workflow wrapper and works fine on my Mac with OS X 10.10.3. Thanks to Jonathan Sick and contributors for providing and maintaining such a useful tool!