Reference Organiser
Reference Organiser keeps track of technical papers and your reviews/notes on them.
Several years ago I started keeping reviews every time I read a technical paper; mostly to help remember the key points of the paper but also as a source for copying and pasting a summary as the basis of a literature survey.
Reference Organiser helps to manage the creation of reviews and acts as a search engine to locate a particular paper and the notes that go with it.
Features
- Scan a number of directories, find and associate each paper with a review
- Open papers via external programs
- Parse some details from review
- Title from first line
- Comma separated authors list from second line
- Year from citation; a letter can be added after in case the same authors published several papers in that year
- Create a new review
- Edit a review
- Delete a review
- Search reviews by year, author(s) name, keywords in title or your review
- Export all reviews as a flat HTML file
Screenshots
Main Window
Papers/reviews are listed by their citation. From here you can filter the list; add, edit or delete a review. You can list papers without reviews and reviews missing papers. More advanced filtering is available using the search function
Editing a Review
You can enter basic metadata and generate a unique citation that does not duplicate an existing citation
Search
Basic search is on a logical OR basis except for the year range. Keywords can be quoted with spaces. Results are unordered. Results from the last search are available as a filter in the main window.
Status
Evaluate the quality of your database using very simple metrics.
Instructions
- Create two directories (unless they already exist): one for storing papers, one for storing reviews
- The first time you use Reference Organiser select the two directories in Preferences
- Choose a reference citation for the paper based on the author's names and year of publication, e.g. SmithJones2017
- Rename the paper as SmithJones2017.pdf
- Write up reviews in a plain text file named SmithJones2017, with a simple format:
- First line is paper title
- Second line is a list of authors, separated by commas
- The rest is the review
- Citations to other papers can be given using braces, e.g. ... builds on the work of {SmithJones2016}.
The idea of the simple format means that the reviews can easily be reformatted and imported into other software.
Future Plans/Ideas/Wishlist
- Support use of external editors
- Rank search results
- Use a backend database to store full paper references
- Import/Export BibTeX files
- Allow some markdown in the paper reviews
- Papers with similar topics
- Visualise links between papers of similar subjects/authors as a graph
- User editable "collections" of papers, or simply use tags
- Parse details from a PDF
Download
| File | Size | Platform | MD5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| RefOrg-1.2-x86_64.AppImage | 31 MB | Linux AppImage | 04819383b8f4ee8c8ae89542a1b5a9c9 |
| RefOrg-1.2.dmg | 12 MB | MacOS X | bbea6f2db42202bb2f5215d24d4e8dd8 |
| RefOrg-1.2-win.zip | 19 MB | Windows | bb4a1084080b4ef2b00585ee99ae4399 |
Source code is on github
Notes
The Linux version is packaged using AppImage to make a distribution agnostic executable. Download the file, rename it to ReferenceOrganiser, make it executable using chmod a+x ReferenceOrganiser and run.
For the Mac version, download the DMG, double click to mount it and copy the application to your Applications folder. You may need to change your Security and Privacy preferences to allow you to run applications from "identified developers".
The Windows version is built on Windows 10 but should work on most modern versions. It is not digitally signed and therefore you may have to deal with annoying warnings claiming that this application is dangerous. Unzip the download and copy the RefOrg-X.Y directory to somewhere on your PC. You can then make a shortcut and place it on your desktop or whatever.
Licensing
This software is licensed under the GNU GPL (version 3).