The thing to do here is write a function that will take a bibtex key, and loop through your directories to find the pdf, and then return the full path to the pdf. Then customize the variable org-ref-get-pdf-filename-function to point to that function.
https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/master/org-ref.el#L122 Out of the box, org-ref expects all the pdfs to be named key.pdf and to be in a single directory. That is partly due to this library https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/master/doi-utils.el which downloads pdfs for you from a doi in that format. John ----------------------------------- Professor John Kitchin Doherty Hall A207F Department of Chemical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412-268-7803 @johnkitchin http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Michael Giepen <mgie...@uni-bonn.de> wrote: > Hello, > > I just cannot get org-ref to accept various directories: > > I tried > > (setq org-ref-pdf-directory (quote ( > "/home/mcg/thesis/library/folder1/" > "/home/mcg/thesis/library/folder2/" > "/home/mcg/thesis/library/folder3/" > ))) > > > It would also suffice if I could include subdirectories of > .../thesis/library/ > > > >
