Thanks Sphere and RJ ...
tried Zotero,but found even just adding some pdfs wasn't straightforward. I was expecting an "add (import) pdfs to database, then work with them" process.

Qiqqa sounds worth a try - will install and check out the tags and annotations.
The mentions of auto tags puts me off somewhat - I dislike s/ware that knows best what I want. I am assuming though, that I'll be able to turn this off as I don't want to drown in a sea of tags.

Thanks RJ. I'll investigate but probably wouldn't spend the money.
 I found out that PDF Xchange does indeed allow for global searching of its bookmarks and comments (sticky notes)... and saving the search
While I'd like to have a notes type program allowing linking to those, without importing the pdfs themselves, I'm happy enough to go with what I can do.

 .

I download and keep a newspaper, pdf format, text searchable, each day.
I have 2 pieces of software  for doing a key word or phrase search on the year's collection of pdfs.
 My problem though, is that this is not sufficient for keeping track of just some articles on a particular topic....eg I can locate all articles on renewable energy, but only really am interested in 5% of them.
So I want to end up with a list of links, preferably with comments, which allows me to link to relevant pdf articles.
I don't want to do heaps of copy/pasting into a notes database

Three approaches spring to mind:
1. A sticky notes program which would allow for attaching a note to a specific page in a given pdf, and being able to use the sticky notes s/ware to be able to search its database of notes
2. Bookmarking articles or pages in the pdf and then somehow extracting all bookmarks from all pages and using some other (unknown to me) s/ware to manage those. ChatGPT suggested a python routine/script to me to extract bookmarks but it's over my head
3. Some info management s/ware which allows for linking to specific locations in local pdfs. I saw that excel allows this if you use acrobat and within that, copy the page number. I use PDF-xchange and can't seem to do that.

Probably there's a better way, as I'm sure this is not a unique want. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks
Tony