Docear

Docear is what the developers call an “academic literature suite”. Comparable to Microsoft Office, which bundles several applications for office workers, Docear bundles several applications for academics. As of now, these applications are BibTeX based reference management, mind mapping, and some pdf management capabilities. For the future, Docear is supposed to integrate a word processor, PDF editor and academic search engine.

Docear is written in Java, licensed under the GNU General Public License and based on the open source software Freeplane and JabRef. The term ‘Docear’ has two meanings. First, it is pronounced similarly to “dog ear”, the folded down corner of a paper page. Second, “docear” in Latin means “I would be taught”.

History

Docear is the successor of SciPlore MindMapping (aka FreeMind Scholar) which was originally developed by Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp as part of their PhD projects in 2009 at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg and University of California, Berkeley. In July 2011, Joeran Beel and his colleagues Stefan Langer and Marcel Genzmehr received a grant to re-develop SciPlore MindMapping, since then being called Docear. While SciPlore MindMapping was based on FreeMind, Docear is built upon the mind mapping software Freeplane and the reference manager JabRef. The first version of SciPlore MindMapping was released in May 2009. The first private Alpha of Docear was released in December 2011, the first public Beta in February 2012 which was later presented on CeBIT.