So, renaming is done manually (forces me to look at the PDF). I use preview on OSX, or any viewer other than Acrobat Reader on Windows and Linux (Acrobat Reader locks the file preventing renames). Several Python libraries exist for extracting metadata. I'm trying a couple of different approaches. At the moment I just take the title of the PDF and do a search on Google Scholar using the scholarly python library -- but this is really very suboptimal and I want to replace it with something faster and more robust.