Docear

Docear

Docear is a mind mapping and reference management software based on the open source Freeplane mind mapper. It helps users to collect, organize, and analyze research articles. Its key features include mind maps, reference management, annotations, and more.
Docear image
mind-mapping reference-management research organization

Docear: Mind Mapping & Reference Management Softwares

Docear is a mind mapping and reference management software based on the open source Freeplane mind mapper. It helps users to collect, organize, and analyze research articles. Its key features include mind maps, reference management, annotations, and more.

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.

Docear Features

Features

  1. Mind mapping
  2. Reference management
  3. Annotations
  4. Academic literature suite
  5. BibTeX support
  6. PDF metadata extraction
  7. Knowledge model

Pricing

  • Free
  • Open Source

Pros

Free and open source

User-friendly interface

Powerful mind mapping capabilities

Good reference management

Supports multiple platforms

Cons

Steep learning curve

Limited styles and templates

Not very customizable

Lacks real-time collaboration


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