Call for donation was successful: 1800 Euros donated to improve Docear’s PDF metadata retrieval function

One month ago, we started a call for donation and asked our users for money so we could pay our student Christoph to improve Docear’s PDF metadata retrieval. We asked for 1800 Euros (~2500 US$) and today we achieved our goal. We would like to thank all donors who made this possible. We received dozens of donations, the highest being 250 Euros and a few others around 100 and 150 Euros. But however large your small your contribution was, be ensured that we highly appreciate it.

As of today, Christoph starts with his work.  Cross your fingers that he will be able to finish as much tickets as possible. He will start with improving the dialog to retrieve metadata and implementing a function to request metadata from Google Scholar. This way, you won’t depend on Docear’s Web Service any more. You can follow the progress on GitHub, feel free to tell us all your ideas and wishes you have directly here in the Blog or on GitHub.

 Update March 7: Here is a screenshot of the new dialog. It works already pretty well. When you want to create a new reference for a PDF, the title is extracted automatically  and sent to Google Scholar. The first three matches of Google Scholar are shown and you can pick one. In case the title is not extracted correctly, you can alter the search string. Alternatively, you may choose to use the PDF’s file name as search string. The next step will be to add a option to answer Google Scholar’s captcha (when you query Google Scholar too often, Google bans your IP you unless you enter a captcha).