Jöran Beel, a Ph.D. student who is studying mind mapping, recently created a specialized version of FreeMind – which he calls SciPlore – that gives it several additional features that make it very attractive to researchers. Specifically, it can:
1. Import the bookmarks of PDFs. If you drag and drop a PDF file into a mind map, all bookmarks of the PDF are imported. That’s extremely useful for collegiate research, where all of the sources you use in a paper need to be cited. It’s cool that this application automates that process.
2. You can add reference keys to reference sources manually.
3. Reference keys can also be added automatically. If you link a PDF in your reference database (e.g. BibTeX file) and you link the same PDF in your mind map, SciPlore MindMapping extracts the BibTeX key from the reference database and adds it to the node.
SciPlore is based on FreeMind (0.9 RC4 Max) and developed in Java. It runs under Windows and also run under Linux and Mac OS. SciPlore is 100% free and published under the GNU/GPL licence.
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