using JabRef version 4.3.1 on Lubuntu 16.04
This may well be the intended behaviour, however, I find it very confusing for the following reason:
I use an author-year naming scheme, so my BibTex keys are named e.g. Author_2007, Author_2007a, Author_2007b etc. When I save pdfs in some folder while researching on the web, I use a similar scheme for my filenames, namely „author - title“, but without the appended letters a,b,c since at that point I don’t know them. This leads to the following situation
- I run „automatically set file links“
- correctly, the entry „Author_2007a“ is associated only with files that have the exact same beginning, so it doesn’t find the file „Author_2007 - title of second paper“. That’s fine, though, because I can always add it via drag and drop.
- the entry „Author_2007“ automatically gets ALL of „Author_2007a“, „Author_2007b“, „Author_2007c“… linked to it. This is annoying because now next time I look for interesting entries that I lack the papers for, I think I already have it, and I wasn’t planning to do anything to that entry in the first place.
A very simple solution would be if the „automatically set file links“ function only applied to selected entries. This would also make more sense because normally you need to do this exactly once per entry.
For me, I came to solve this issue by using a BibTex-Key scheme where all keys have letters appended, but I think it is still counter-intuitive.
Cheers,
Jan