If you’re a researcher or even a college student writing research papers, one of the arduous tasks waiting for you is the literature review. You probably start with a single paper and want to find related papers that address the same problem. In the past, this was a hard problem but the digitization of papers has made it easier.
John Kitchin has made it easier yet. I’ve written before about his excellent org-ref, a package that helps organize and automate references. The org-ref package has always supported literature review but recently Kitchin has added some new features that take advantage of OpenAlex to find
- Similar papers
- Citations of the paper
- Papers listed in the references
It’s an excellent addition that makes literature review a little less onerous. The reason org-ref is so useful is that Kitchin wrote it for his own use as a researcher and it therefore meets real needs as opposed to theoretical needs that someone not involved with research might imagine. If you haven’t already watched Kitchin’s video on org-ref, be sure to take a look. If you’re a researcher it will be enough to make you take up Emacs. It’s a truly amazing piece of software.
I’ve long been a fan of Kitchin’s work and this latest addition to org-ref is a good reason why.