Docear

Docear is an academic literature suite designed for researchers, students, and academics who need to manage, organize, and discover scholarly papers. Its key capabilities include a single-section user interface that enables users to sort documents and annotations—such as comments, bookmarks, and highlighted text from PDFs—into categories. Users can view multiple annotations from multiple documents across multiple categories simultaneously. The software follows a "literature suite concept," combining PDF management, reference management, and mind mapping into one application, which allows users to draft papers, assignments, or theses directly within Docear and copy annotations and references from their collection into the draft. Additionally, Docear includes a recommender system that suggests free, full-text papers tailored to the user's information needs, available for immediate download. The application is free and open source, supporting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It uses open data formats such as BibTeX and XML, does not require registration, and offers PDF metadata retrieval as well as free online backup.