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I have to read a bunch of papers (journal articles) and do a full literature review as part of my PhD (I probably should have done it already in fact). I wanted to have a nice way to record notes on papers and keep track of them so that I can easily find the paper I’m looking for in a month or a years time. I was talking to my collegue Mark Jones about this and he told me how he makes maps in Inkscape. Each paper is a box with the title, authors, notes and any quotes he likes in it. Then if that paper references any other interesting looking papers, they get added as new boxes with an arrow from the referencing paper. This way, he can see which papers have been influencial (lots of arrows going to them) in the area in a visual way as well as keeping track of what he’s read and any notes he’s taken. I liked the sound of that a lot but I didn’t want to have to do it all in Inkscape as I’m an Inkscape noob. So, I made my own version.
It’s a website based on vis.js and is basicly a nicer way of doing what Mark does. You can add a paper and all of the relevant details and it will draw a box for you. You can then add references between papers by selecting the referencing paper and CTRL + clicking the referenced paper. You can also add a link to a paper so that a double click on the box will go straight to the pdf. I didn’t want to add any server back end, so when you’re done for the day, you can download a JSON file that describes your paper map. It’s fully human readable and editable. Then you can Git it or Dropbox it or whatever and when you want to edit the map again, just go to the URL and upload your map file.
It’s on Github with an MIT licence. A live version can be found here. There’s even a handy demo map that you can load up to quickly see how it all works. It’s rough around the edges at the moment as I didn’t want to spend much time on it. If I find it useful, I’ll probably add a few features and tidy it up a little. I’d like it to do BibTeX export at some stage.
