What is Docear?
Docear is a free, open source software designed for academic literature management and mind mapping. It combines the functions of reference managers like Mendeley or Zotero with those of mind mappers like Freeplane or XMind.
Some of the key features of Docear include:
- Creating mind maps to organize ideas and literature
- Managing references with metadata and annotations
- Brainstorming concepts and extracting annotations
- Finding academic literature recommendations
- Automatic backups and BibTeX interoperability
- Available as a desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
Docear uses mind maps to help organize academic literature and PDF documents. The mind maps make it easy to brainstorm ideas, structure concepts, and see connections between various articles/papers. References can be dragged from the file explorer directly onto the mind map nodes.
The reference management functions allow you to organize your collection of research articles in a hierarchical category system. Metadata like authors, journals, tags, annotations etc. are automatically extracted from PDF papers. References and annotations from PDFs can also be directly included into LaTeX documents for citations.
Overall, Docear is an academic workflow system to search, analyze, organize, and understand research literature. The combination of mind mapping and reference management makes it unique among its competitors like Mendeley, EndNote or Zotero.
Xmind, FreeMind, MindManager , Miro, Zotero, Mendeley, TheBrain, MindMeister, Freeplane, Qiqqa, JabRef, BibSonomy are some alternatives to Docear.