Today I was giving a presentation about Docear. Among others I wanted to show how positive many researchers respond to the concept of Docear. So I assembled a little picture with quotes about Docear (SciPlore MindMapping respectively) (see figure below).
After the presentation one of the attendees told me, he was surprised to not find any of the quotes on our testimonial page. Well, he was absolutely right. The most enthusiastic feedback we receive is by email. I have no clue why, but users seem to be a little bit shy when posting their opinion publicly.
For us, it’s really important to know what users think and their feedback – your feedback – may really help us, for instance, to convince our university to provide us with further resources (at least if your feedback is positive ;-). So, I would like to ask you: If you are a Docear user, write a short testimonial. Don’t send it by email, don’t post in here as a comment – leave it on our testimonial page, and please be a little bit enthusiastic :-). Surely, we don’t want you to write something you do not really think. But please also don’t hold back. And of course, we are also happy to hear constructive criticism. If you have ideas on improving Docear, if there is something you don’t like, let us know in our forum and we will happily discuss the issue with you.
Docear 1.0 Beta 6 is available for download. There are quite a few improvements and new features. The major change is a small icon to refresh the incoming mind map. Instead of selecting the entry in the menu, you can just click on the icon to get a new list of all your PDFs. In addition, when you create a new workspace (or start Docear for the very first time), the mind maps in the Library (Incoming, Literature & Annotations, …) will have a brief description for how to use them. We hope these two new features make Docear easier to use. Furthermore, Adobe Reader X and Professional are now correctly recognized by Docear and LaTeX users will be happy to hear that they can copy reference keys with a \cite{} prefix.
The complete changes are as follows
Yesterday we released Beta 5 of Docear with two major improvements. First, Docear fully supports Zotero. That means as a Zotero user you can use Zotero as you are used to and work with the same PDF files and references in Docear. For instructions on setting up Docear for Zotero read our manual. Second, we strongly improved the support for many PDF readers. Annotations from http://www.cerience.com/products/reader
RepliGo may be imported by Docear and PDF XChange Viewer (PDFXV) now is fully supported: Docear will automatically adjust the settings of PDFXV so that all kind of annotations (highlighted text, comments, bookmarks) may be imported. In addition, on first start of Docear, or when you install a new PDF reader, Docear lets you select your preferred reader and, if the reader supports this, automatically sets the right settings for the “jump-to-page” feature (i.e. the PDF will be opened on the page of an annotation).
The screenshot shows the PDF-Reader selection dialog. It should list the following PDF readers (if installed on your system): Foxit Reader, Adobe Reader, PDF XChange Viewer, Skim, Preview. Adobe Acrobat Professional probably will be support in the next Beta. If on your system not all installed readers are displayed, please let us know.
So, which PDF reader is the most recommendable?
So far, rather few people try out our experimental versions. Therefore, I would like to use the chance making some advertisement for them :-). Before we release a new version on http://www.docear.org/software/download/we always release at least one experimental version (usually two or three). They are not necessarily worse than the final Read more…
It’ already a few weeks ago that we moved to a new office. The computer science department of our university (OvGU) sponsors it and it’s really great, and huge. It has space for six or even seven work spaces and there is a second room for another two or three people (again a big ‘thank you’ to our university and our mentor Prof. Andreas Nürnberger). As you maybe know, the core team of Docear are three people (Stefan, Marcel and me) and then there are a few students, volunteers and of course Bela, who co-founded SciPlore MindMapping, but who is in Berkeley now. That means, we have still some workspace to fill and we already began to fill it with a new intern :-). Two days ago, Cheng arrived from the university of Cambridge where he studies physics. He will stay for two month with us and will support the software development of Docear. This is particular good news for MacOS users because Cheng has a Mac and hence we can test Docear on a real Mac for the first time.
(Part of) the Docear team (Marcel, Stefan, Joeran, Cheng) in the new office
Btw. if you are interested in an internship, or writing your thesis about Docear, please read here and contact us. We have lots of great projects to work on, there are many research fields you can do research in, and, as you know, there is enough space in our office :-).
As you might know, Docear originates from ‘SciPlore MindMapping’ which some friends and I developed as part of my PhD studies. Our work was partly financed by my university (Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg) and supported by many others such as the University of California, Berkeley. One year ago my friends Stefan and Marcel and I decided to make SciPlore MindMapping a full-time project, since then being called Docear. Luckily, we received a 100,000€ EXIST scholarship for one year from the European Union and German Federal Ministryof Economics and Technology. Well, that year has passed quite quickly and during the last months we had to think about the future. And the future looks bright 🙂
Stefan Langer, Joeran Beel, and Marcel Genzmehr from Docear at the award ceremony from ego.-BUSINESS
A couple of days ago we received a scholarship that allows Stefan, Marcel and me to work for another 18 month full-time on Docear. The scholarship is granted by the European Union and Federal State of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany. This is just awesome because when I look at the achievements from the past 12 month… I am really excited to think about what we will be able to do in the next 18 months. The scholarship is called ego.-START and we are really glad about all the support we received from the Investitionsbank Sachsen-Anhalt who helped us applying for this scholarship. And as with the previous grant, there are no strings attached. I think this is really amazing and I don’t know of any other country in the world that is that supportive to young researchers and entrepreneurs. ‘Entrepreneurs?’ you might wonder? Yes, we are considering to start a business with Docear.
Beta 4 of Docear is available for download. There are many minor changes and enhancements. For instance, your existing PDF reader (e.g. Foxit) is automatically pre-selected, handling BibTeX files from Mendeley improved (you can automatically resolve duplicate BibTeX keys), and we did many bug fixes. But, there is one major improvement: Docear Beta 4 offers free full-text literature recommendations. In your workspace panel you find a link “Show Recommendations”. If you click this link, a tab will open with a list of research papers that might interest you. If you are a long-time user of Docear and also used SciPlore MindMapping, you might remember that we already had recommendations in SciPlore MindMapping. And you probably remember that they were… well, let’s face it, they were really … crappy. Docear’s recommendations are way better. From my experience I would say they are quite decent and let me tell you that the recommendations will become even better in the future. However, the quality of recommendations also depends on the field of your research. Most of our papers are the field of computer science, accordingly recommendations in this field probably are best. But maybe the best thing about the recommended papers is – they are completely free. Just click on them and they will be downloaded to your literature repository or open in your web browser. Please note, to get recommendations you must have used Docear for a while and must have added at least a few papers to your literature repository.
We are very interested in your opinion: What do you think about the recommendations? How good or bad are they? How important are recommendations for you?
The third Beta of Docear was released today (download here). Besides several bug fixes, the major changes are:
An automatic update-check which informs you when a new version of Docear was released. We also have a proper licence now you have to accept when starting Docear for the first time. Of course, the main licences still remains GPL2+ but we now have additional terms of service for using our online backup etc. We also implemented an optional function to transmit your mind maps to our servers so we can use them for our research (read here for more details). We would kindly ask you to activate this function because it allows us to perform our research on mind maps and the more and better research we do, the more likely we will get additional funding from the German Government to further develop Docear. As stated in our terms of use and data processing terms, we are bound to the very strict German data privacy law and try everything to protect your data. However, if you feel uncomfortable having your mind maps analyzed by us, please just deactivate the options that are shown on first start. You can then use Docear without any data being submitted to us. Finally, you can directly register a Docear account when starting Docear the first time. This account is required if you want to backup your files to our servers. We would highly recommend this since you never know what happens to your computer and you can also access your mind maps through our web interface if you are not at home. Read also here for more information about the backup and alternatives.
Here are all the changes:
Beta 2 brings many new features and even more bug fixes. The most important new feature probably is the online backup. You can register and Docear will create backups of your mind maps on our sever each time you save a mind map. That means, if you should have data loss or need an old version of your mind map you can log-in and easily restore your mind map.
Today, on February 15th, 2012 we released the first public version of Docear. It’s a Beta version and still has some bugs and missing features but overall it will give you a thorough impression of what we consider an academic literature suite to be.
The main idea behind Docear is that you annotate everything you consider important in a PDF. That means, you highlight text, write comments, or create bookmarks in the PDF. To create bookmarks and comments, you can use almost any PDF reader (highlighting text is a bit more complicated). These PDF annotations are then imported by Docear to a mind map. In this mind map you can organize all your annotations into categories, create further nodes and add more text. With the integrated reference manager, bibliographic data can be added to each of the PDF annotations (and all other nodes in the mind map). Then, you can create a new mind map, drag e.g. a research paper, copy your annotations to the draft and if you need more information you just click on the PDF annotation and the PDF will open on the page the annotation was made. Watch this video to get a better idea of what Docear can do (watch it in full-screen mode). (more…)
The Alpha version of Docear is ready to be released and we are really proud of what we achieved the last six months. From the old “SciPlore MindMapping” is nothing left, except the basic idea. Have a look at the major changes and try the Alpha now (if you are a SciPlore MindMapping user – otherwise you have to wait a couple of weeks). (more…)