FreePub: Collecting and Organizing Scientific Material Using Mindmaps

TL;DR

FreePub is a tool that integrates mindmaps with publication search to help researchers organize scientific materials and supporting content visually, enhancing creativity and information management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of mindmaps with publication search and organization, supporting creativity cycles in scientific research.

Findings

Supports browsing and organizing diverse scientific materials

Enables search for publications and supporting content within mindmaps

Implemented as an extension of FreeMind

Abstract

This paper presents a creativity support tool, called FreePub, to collect and organize scientific material using mindmaps. Mindmaps are visual, graph-based represenations of concepts, ideas, notes, tasks, etc. They generally take a hierarchical or tree branch format, with ideas branching into their subsections. FreePub supports creativity cycles. A user starts such a cycle by setting up her domain of interest using mindmaps. Then, she can browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant publications from several data sources. FreePub, besides publications, identifies helpful supporting material (e.g., blog posts, presentations). All retrieved information from FreePub can be imported and organized in mindmaps. FreePub has been fully implemented on top of FreeMind, a popular open-source, mindmapping tool.