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, the path on disk to the paper
  • Revisit previous searches
• 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

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.

Use of Tag Controls

(Pictures to be added here). There are two windows where you can modify tags: the main window and the new review/edit review window.

You can type tags directly into the edit box; use commas to separate tags and use hyphens instead of spaces. If you type a new tag into the new review/edit window edit box then the tag will be added to the list of tags when you save the review.

If you want to use a pre-existing tag then select it from the drop down list (also known as a combo box) and then press the '+' button. It will be automatically added to the list of tags in the edit box. Click on the 'X' button to clear the list of tags.

In the main window where you can filter by tags, there is also the option to toggle between logical OR and logical AND when filtering by tag.

Keyboard Shortcut Reference

Shortcut	Action
F5	Refresh main window
Ctrl+E	Export database as HTML
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Ctrl+I	About
Ctrl+P	Preferences
Ctrl+T	Database status
Ctrl+N	New review
Ctrl+F	Search
Ctrl+A	Add paper

Search

Clicking on the Search button in the main window takes you to the search dialog. From there you can select search terms, then click on the Search button to perform the search. Results will be shown in the form of a list of matching citations. Close the search dialog to return to the main window where the paper list filter will be set to show search results.

The up and down arrow buttons can be used to recall previous searches.

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

• Support use of external editors
• Rank search results
• Import/Export BibTeX files (currently BibTex is shown for each review based on metadata entered)
• Support more 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
• Parse details from a PDF

Download

Source code is on github

I haven't built any releases for some time but I hope to revisit this. In the mean time you can build yourself.

1. Clone the repo
2. Download Qt 6 from qt.io and install *
3. Open QtCreator
4. Open ReferenceOrganiser.pro file in QtCreator
5. In the bottom left of the QtCreator window:
   • Click on the icon that looks like a display and set to release mode
   • Click on the icon that looks like a play button to build and run
   • The binary should now be in the build directory. If you don't know where that is, click on the Projects icon in the left tool bar to find it
6. Done

* Check https://www.qt.io/download-open-source and scroll down to the button to download the online installer.

Licensing

This software is licensed under the GNU GPL (version 3).