LiteRef: A software system for managing the knowledge of research literature

摘要

To acquire knowledge of a research area, a researcher needs to understand many papers and their interrelations. The existing reference management systems help the researcher maintain and use a database of research papers, but do little to help understand the research area as a whole. The paper presents LiteRef, a novel reference management system that addresses this need by effectively integrating tools for (1) organizing knowledge about both individual papers and connections between the papers, (2) visualizing whole research directions/areas and (3) producing well-formed surveys to share this knowledge in a variety of formats. After describing LiteRef’s design and features, the paper shows an example of how LiteRef helps further the author’s own research. Extensive documentation with a video demo for each major feature supplements the paper.