My Research Helper:

a Web-base Scientific Paper Management System

By Mehrez KRISTOU
mehrez@kristou.com
University of Tsukuba
Motivation
Many computers  fragmented papers organization
Traditional paper management not easy to find the
right paper In the right time
Papers wish lists  not easy to keep track
You need to read a paper  You are not in the lab
…
Purpose
Web based scientific papers management
+ Online : accessible anywhere
+ Simple: easy to use
+ Personal: My private space
+ Import / export: easy to import and export papers data
+ Statistics: Meta data related to papers
+ Online annotation
+ Papers segmentation into research axis
Existing solutions
The list is long:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference
_management_software

We did find that We need more than one solution to

fulfill our needs.
Powerful solutions are standalone and OS specific
Project info
Started on 25 Feb 2010
Technologies used:
Programming languages:
 PHP
 Javascript
 CSS
Frameworks
 Codeigniter
 ExtJs
 Jquery
Database: MySQL
Easy to login
Easy to login
Easy & Intuitive
Easy & Intuitive
Handy organization
Create collection from keywords
Create collection from selected papers
Flag paper with the color that it make sense to you
Keep notes on paper, author, journal and even
keyword
Every thing is related: Related papers view
Online storage
One account for each user
100Mb of online for the user workspace, includes
papers and previews  up to 50 papers with their PDF
files, papers information are not included
Accessible everywhere
A downloadable backup
Paper Annotation
Future work
Add more import and export targets
Finish the user management and profile
Implement an API to interface with standalone
applications
Implement a social aspect to share notes, recommend
papers, share articles reading status …
Develop standalone application in Java to manage the
library offline and allow an online synchronization
Finish the implementation of the handset dedicated
interface: IPhone, Android and WebOS
Use the user Dropbox/UbuntuOne account as workspace
storage
Need testing
 This application is still in Beta stage
 Mentioned functions are working but NOT all of their
usage scenarios are tested

 Which features you want to see?

 You want to help? You are warmly welcome
 You want discuss used technologies or propose others?
We are on facebook (MyResearchHelper page)
We are on Twitter (researchhelper)
By mail: webmaster@myresearchhelper.com /
mehrez@kristou.com