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 process of reading papers and acts
as a search engine to locate a particular paper and the notes that go with it.
Features
Create a new review
Edit a review
Delete a review
Add a paper for reviewing later
Automatic citation generation using authors names and year
Open papers via external programs
Search reviews by year, author(s) name, keywords in title or your
review
Full bibliographic details capture
Tags
Ratings
For the paper you have reviewed
As a reviewer for a conference or journal
Of your understanding
Support for DOI links and paper/project URL
Export all reviews as a flat HTML file
Edit reviews in a simple format using a text editor and import into
Reference Organiser later
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
New 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
The first time you run Reference Organiser you need to set up a database
so there is somewhere to store your reviews - you will be prompted to do
this. The database file will have the extension "rodb".
In Preferences, set up a directory for new papers and one for stored
papers.
To add a review, you have two choices, 1. Click on the New button to start
entering full details or 2. Click on the Add button to enter brief details,
add the remaining details and review later. Option 2 is so that you can add
the paper to the database without being concerned about finding all the
details that you can add later. When you have time, scan through the
Unreviewed Papers and choose a paper to read.
Writing Reviews Outside of Reference Organiser
Reference Organiser has a simple text editor built in, but should you find
yourself writing notes for a paper on a computer other than the one you
installed Reference Organiser on, there is a simple format that you
can use that makes it easy to import.
Choose a reference citation for the paper based on the authors names
and year of publication, e.g. suppose the paper authors were J. Smith
and A. Jones, written in 2023: choose SmithJones2023
Rename the paper to match the citation, e.g. SmithJones2023.pdf
Write up reviews in a plain text file named SmithJones2023,
with a simple format:
First line is paper title
Second line is a list of authors, separated by commas, all on one line
The rest is the review
Citations to other papers can be given using braces, e.g.
... builds on the work of {SmithJones2022}.
Using a simple format means that the reviews can easily be reformatted and
imported into other software.
Future Plans/Ideas/Wishlist
Keep a history of recently edited or viewed reviews
Support use of external editors
Rank search results
Import/Export BibTeX files
Support more markdown in the paper reviews
Papers with similar topics
Visualise links between papers of similar subjects/authors as a graph