Update 2018-07-31: We updated the Dropbox Link Google Scholar recently changed its layout, and as a consequence, Docear couldn’t fetch metadata anymore from Google Scholar for PDF files. Fortunately, one of our users (“Silberzwiebel”) adjusted Docear’s Google Scholar Parser, and now everything works as usual. However, we have not yet integrated Read more…
We released version 1.3 of Mr. DLib´s Recommender-System as-a-Service. The new major feature is “word embeddings” based recommendations. We are excited to see how the new recommendations will perform with our partners. In addition, we fixed many small bugs, and added some minor improvements. A complete overview can be found Read more…
The new version of our recommender system completes 104 issues and significantly improves the recommendations. The most notable improvements are: We improved the keyphrase extraction process in the recommender system, i.e. keyphrases are not stored differently in Lucene. We expect better recommendation effectiveness and are currently running an A/B test. More Read more…
There are two major news coming along with the new version of Mr. DLib’s Recommendation API. JabRef finally uses Mr. DLib for it’s recommender system We have announced this already a while ago, but now, finally, Mr. DLib’s recommendations are available in one of the most popular open-source reference managers, Read more…
On 28th February, we released version 1.1.1 of Mr. DLib’s recommender system with some minor improvements and bug fixes: Improved 404 error handling for unknown document IDs Fix: The order of authors in the XML was not sorted properly Several internal changes (adjusted logging table; click time is not updated any Read more…
We are proud to announce version 1.1 of Mr. DLib’s Recommender-System as-a-Service. The major new features are: A JavaScript Client to request recommendations from Mr. DLib. The JavaScript offers many advantages compared to a server-side processing of our recommendations. Among others, the main page will load faster while recommendations are requested in the Read more…
Currently, all of Docear’s online services are down, including the recommender system. This means, you cannot register, log-in to download backups, or receive recommendations. As we have no time right now for the development of Docear, we are afraid that we won’t be able to fix this problem anytime soon. Read more…
Content-based filtering recommendations suffer from the problem that no human quality assessments are taken into account. This means a poorly written paper ppoor would be considered equally relevant for a given input paper pinput as high-quality paper pquality if pquality and ppoor contain the same words. We elevate for this problem by using Mendeley’s readership data Read more…
We have integrated several new recommendation algorithms into Mr. DLib. Some recommendation algorithms are only ought as baselines for our researchers, others hopefully will further increase the effectiveness of Mr. DLib. Overall, Mr. DLib now uses the following recommendation algorithms in its recommender system: Random Recommendations The approach recommendation randomly picks Read more…
So far, Mr. DLib’s recommender system was running only on a single server. Consequently, when me messed up something in the development environment, sometimes the production system was affected, i.e. down. From today on, we have two additional dedicated servers running, meaning we have a total of three recommender-system servers, one for Read more…
We are proud to announce that the social science portal Sowiport is using Mr. DLib´s recommender-system as-a-service as first pilot partner. Sowiport pools and links quality information from domestic and international providers, making it available in one place. Sowiport currently contains 9.5 million references on publications and research projects. The Read more…
After releasing the Beta some weeks ago, we made some minor adjustments, and consider the current version 1.2 as stable. There are two major improvements and two bad news: Various improvements in the PDF Metadata retrieval function for Google Scholar. If you had some problems in the previous Docear versions with retrieving metadata Read more…
Docear 1.2 Beta is now available and has two major improvements: A new add-on to import any kind of highlighted text from PDFs This new add-on is a true milestone in the Docear development. Until now, you could only import highlighted text from PDF editors that copied the highlighted text Read more…
As you may know, Docear features a recommender system for academic literature. To find out which papers you might be interested in, the recommender system parses your mind maps and compares them to our digital library with currently about 1.8 million academic articles. While this is helpful and might point you to papers relevant for your general research goals, you will sometimes have to find information on a specific topic and hence search directly.
Based on our knowledge about recommender systems and some user requests, we decided to implement a direct search feature on our digital library. I am very grateful to Keystone, who supported me in visiting Dr. Georgia Kapitsaki at the University of Cyprus (UCY) in Nicosia for a full month to work on this idea. Dr. Kapitsaki’s has already supported us in our work on Docear’s recommender system in July 2013. Her knowledge about the inner mechanics and her ideas on the the search engine were essential for the implementation and the research part of the project.
You can access the search feature from Docear’s ribbon bar (“Search and Filter > Documents > Online search”) or by double-clicking the “Online search” entry in Docear’s workspace panel. Since both the recommender system and the personalized search engine make use of your mind maps. you need to enable the recommendation service in Docear.
After opening the search page, you will see
Finally, after releasing the alpha and beta, today we release Docear 1.1 stable. If you have tried already one of the previous versions, there is not much news. Otherwise, read on.
Thanks to all the generous donors, our student Christoph could work on an improved PDF metadata retrieval for Docear. The new Docear 1.1 is able to extract the title of a PDF and fetch metadata from Google Scholar for that title. To do so, select a PDF in your mind-map and chose “Create or Update reference”, …
… and the following new dialog appears. The dialog shows the file name of your PDF file, and the extracted title. In the background, the extracted title is sent to Google Scholar and metadata for the first two search results are shown in the dialog. If the title was extracted incorrectly, you can manually correct it. You may also chose to use the PDF’s file name for the search. For instance, when you named your PDF already according to the title, select the radio button with the file name, and the file name is sent as search query to Google Scholar (you may also manually correct the file name before it’s sent to Google Scholar). Of course, all other options you already know are still available, such as creating a blank entry, or importing the XMP data of PDFs. Btw. Docear remembers your choice, i.e. when you select to create a blank entry, the option will be pre-selected when open that dialog the next time. It might happen, that your IP will be blocked by Google Scholar when you use the service too frequently. If this happens, a captcha should appear, and after solving it, you should be able to proceed. We did not yet test this thoroughly. Please let us know your experiences.
The precision of our metadata tool depends on two factors, A) the precision of the title extraction and B) the coverage of Google Scholar. According to a recent experiment, title extraction of our tool is around 70%. However, the final result very much depends on the format of your research articles. In my research field (i.e. recommender systems), I would say that our tool extracts the title correctly for about 90% of the articles in my personal library. In addition, almost all articles that are relevant for my research are indexed by Google Scholar (i would estimate, more than 90%). This means, for around 80% of my PDFs the correct metadata is retrieved fully automatically. Given that I provide the title manually, for even more than 90% the metadata may be retrieved. Please let us know your experience (and your research field). (more…)
If you have tested the Preview of Docear 1.1 you may already know about some of Docear’s new features. With your feedback and the mind maps, log files and BibTeX files you shared with us, these features have matured. We are proud to introduce the first (and hopefully only) Beta release of Docear 1.1.
Thanks to your donations, our student Christoph greatly enhanced Docear’s PDF metadata retrieval. For us, it works really great, and with Docear 1.1 Beta the last bugs have been fixed. Btw. if you like what Christoph did, and if you are using LibreOffice, or OpenOffice, please also read our call for donation to develop an add-on for these two text processing tools.
Thanks to all the generous donors, our student Christoph could work on an improved PDF metadata retrieval for Docear, and today it’s time to present the first preview. The new Docear 1.1 (preview) is able to extract the title of a PDF and fetch appropriate metadata from Google Scholar. Whenever you select a PDF in your mind-map and chose “Create or Update reference”, the following new dialog appears.
The dialog shows the file name of your PDF file, and the extracted title. In the background, the extracted title is sent to Google Scholar and metadata for the first three search results are shown in the dialog. If the title was extracted incorrectly, you can manually correct it. You may also chose to use the PDF’s file name for the search. For instance, when you named your PDF already according to the title, select the radio button with the file name, and the file name is sent as search query to Google Scholar (you may also manually correct the file name before it’s sent to Google Scholar). Of course, all other options you already know are still available, such as creating a blank entry, or importing the XMP data of PDFs. Btw. Docear remembers your choice, i.e. when you select to create a blank entry, the option will be pre-selected when open that dialog the next time. It might happen, that your IP will be blocked by Google Scholar when you use the service too frequently. If this happens, a captcha should appear, and after solving it, you should be able to proceed. We did not yet test this thoroughly. Please let us know your experiences.
The precision of our metadata tool depends on two factors, A) the precision of the title extraction and B) the coverage of Google Scholar. According to a recent experiment, title extraction of our tool is around 70%. However, the final result very much depends on the format of your research articles. In my research field (i.e. recommender systems), I would say that our tool extracts the title correctly for about 90% of the articles in my personal library. In addition, almost all articles that are relevant for my research are indexed by Google Scholar (i would estimate, more than 90%). This means, for around 80% of my PDFs the correct metadata is retrieved fully automatically. Given that I provide the title manually, for even more than 90% the metadata may be retrieved. Please let us know your experience (and your research field). (more…)
Docear4Word 1.30 is available for download. We improved the error handling, the speed, and the robustness for special characters in BibTeX keys. Here are all changes in detail A database parsing error during Refresh now displays message with line and column information. More robustness for special characters in BibTeX keys: Read more…
Update: February 18, 2014: No bugs were reported, as such we declare Docear 1.03 with its recommender system as stable. It can be downloaded on the normal download page.
With Docear 1.0.3 beta we have improved PDF handling, the recommender system, provided some help for new users and enhanced the way how you can access your mind maps online.
PDF Handling
We fixed several minor bugs with regard to PDF handling. In previous versions of Docear, nested PDF bookmarks were imported twice when you drag & dropped a PDF file to the mind map. Renaming PDF files from within Docear changed the file links in your mind maps but did not change them in your BibTeX file. Both issues are fixed now. To rename a PDF file from within Docear you just have to right-click it in Docear’s workspace panel on the left hand side and it is important that the mind maps you have linked the file in, are opened. We know, this is still not ideal, and will improve this in future versions of Docear.
Rate Your Recommendations
You already know about our recommender system for academic literature. If you want to help us improving it, you can now rate how good a specific set of recommendations reflects your personal field of interest. Btw. it would be nice if you do not rate a set of recommendations negatively only because it contains some recommendations you received previously. Currently, we have no mechanism to detect duplicate recommendations.
The new Docear4Word v1.23 is out as Beta version. Changes are A more detailed error message when there is a parsing error in your BibTeX file. The latest v1.0.517 version of CiteProc-JS has been included. This should finally solve all the sorting and numbering issues. We made some adjustment that Read more…
We discovered a serious bug in Docear that relates to the PDF management. In some situations, it could happen that when you edited a PDF, the annotation IDs were not recognized correctly, and a conflict was shown. We fixed this bug and publish Docear 1.02 as a beta version today. Right now, the Beta version download is only available in our forum. We would appreciate if you could test the new version. If there are no more serious bugs found, we will publish it as stable version without any further notifications.
We also added a “Please Donate” note to the workspace panel. It leads you to our donation page and you are sincerely invited to make use of that page :-). If you have already donated, if you just don’t want to donate, or if you need every pixel in the workspace, do a right-click on that note and you will be able to hide it. In addition, we also changed the welcome page that opens after you have installed Docear.
New “Please donate” note in Docear
New “Welcome” page
A few days ago we released the experimental version of Docear and wrote about it in our experimental release forum (you can subscribe to that forum if you want to be informed about new experimental releases). Today we declare Docear 1.01 as stable and from now on it’s available on our primary download page. Changes are rather minor.
Enhancements include
In addition, we did some bug fixes.
Today, Docear 1.0 (stable) is finally available for Windows, Mac, and Linux to 
download. It’s been almost two years since we released the first private Alpha of Docear and we are really proud of what we accomplished since then. Docear is better than ever, and in addition to all the enhancements we made during the past years, we completely rewrote the manual with step-by-step instructions including an overview of supported PDF viewers, we changed the homepage, we created a new video, and we made the features & details page much more comprehensive. For those who already use Docear 1.0 RC4, there are not many changes (just a few bug fixes). For new users, we would like to explain what Docear is and what makes it so special.
Docear is a unique solution to academic literature management that helps you to organize, create, and discover academic literature. The three most distinct features of Docear are:
Aside from Docear’s unique approach, Docear offers many features more. In particular, we would like to point out that Docear is free, open source, not evil, and Docear gives you full control over your data. Docear works with standard PDF annotations, so you can use your favorite PDF viewer. Your reference data is directly stored as BibTeX (a text-based format that can be read by almost any other reference manager). Your drafts and folders are stored in Freeplane’s XML format, again a text-based format that is easy to process and understood by several other applications. And although we offer several online services such as PDF metadata retrieval, backup space, and online viewer, we do not force you to register. You can just install Docear on your computer, without any registration, and use 99% of Docear’s functionality.
But let’s get back to Docear’s unique approach for literature management…
Today we released Docear4Word 1.2. It contains a few bug fixes. More precisely, we upgraded to the latest citeproc-js version which should fix some ordering problems. In addition, there was a bug that prevented to add the issue number of a reference into the bibliography. That is fixed now. Here Read more…
Today we released the 4th release candidate version of Docear. With all the changes introduced into Docear with RC3, there were still some bugs to fix which could cause some distortion in the workspace tree or even prevented users with Chinese language settings from seeing Docear’s ribbon. RC4 is something like Read more…