Reference Keeper - A Personal Bibliographic & Research Assistant

RefKeep is a software targetted at teachers, students and researchers - people who read and manage a large number of books, journals, magazines and papers regularly. Often, we have difficulty in recalling information. We know that we have read the necessary information somewhere some time ago; but we are unable to locate it efficiently, when it is needed the most. This leads to frustration and lost productivity. RefKeep attempts to alleviate these problems through a tool to manage one's research and other bibliographic information.

RefKeep was started as a student project at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Around 20,000 lines of code have already been written and we have a working version. Screenshots will be available at https://dilu.tripod.com/refkeep.

RefKeep is completely developed in Java, making it platform independent. The User Interfaces are built using Java Swing. All data is stored in XML format.

Features

• Organize and maintain bibliographic information (books, journals, series, papers etc).
• Intelligent searching - based on keyworks (eg: all books related to AI), natural language constructs, user access patterns (eg: paper I read last week).
• Generate Reference lists in various formats (HTML, plain text, custom defined formats). (For eg: a professor wants to put up a list of references for a course on his website)
• Easy insertion of references (citations) of bibliographic sources (for eg: insert a reference to a particular paper you read into the latex file you are editing). The references may be formatted using predefined templates or custom defined templates.
• Keep track of borrowed books, volumes etc, Keep track of journals received.
• Create links between any type of records.
• Each record can be associated with comments/annotations. Separate Note records can also be maintained.
• Use/Import existing bibtex citation repositories.
• Organizes data into RefCollections. Collections can be shared among multiple persons.
• Features possible in the future - integrate with a research project management system, course grading system, access the RefCollections over the internet, etc.

Screenshot