=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2072/paper10
|storemode=property
|title=CloudRef – Towards Collaborative Reference Management in the Cloud
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2072/paper10.pdf
|volume=Vol-2072
|authors=Oliver Kopp,Uwe Breitenbücher,Tamara Müller
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/zeus/KoppBM18
}}
==CloudRef – Towards Collaborative Reference Management in the Cloud==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2072/paper10.pdf
CloudRef – Towards Collaborative
Reference Management in the Cloud
Oliver Kopp1 , Uwe Breitenbücher2 , and Tamara Müller2
1 IPVS, University of Stuttgart, Germany, kopp@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de
2 IAAS, University of Stuttgart, Germany, {lastname}@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de
Abstract. With the help of literature management software, references can be
collected, managed, and exported in bibliographies. Online resources offer func-
tionalities to import references into reference management tools. However, the
entries are often incomplete or faulty. CloudRef proposes to solve this issue by
employing votings for new references and updates of references. To further foster
collaboration, comments on PDFs can be shared among the users of CloudRef.
1 Introduction
When writing a scientific paper one has always to deal with an plethora of literature
on the topic. Reference management software was invented to support researchers in
that regard: The tools are used to collect literature, manage references, and export
bibliographies. They provide an efficient way to keep an overview of a large amount
of literature. Numerous tools provide the opportunity to manage knowledge about
references inside comments, notes, or tags. Researching is often a collaborative task
demanding that literature management software should support collaboration. This
includes sharing references and comments with other users or people who use another
literature management software. Sharing comments with others may be beneficial 1)
to ease understanding the paper itself and 2) to ease finding relevant papers, because
indexable text is provided.
There are multiple resources on the web offering searching for literature such as
“Google Scholar”3 or “The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies”4. Many
of them offer the functionality to import a reference into the preferred reference
management software. However, they often provide incomplete or faulty reference entries.
One exception is MathSciNet, where more than 20 persons take care of the quality of the
references [8]. This quality assurance, however, is not implemented by all publishers.
A correct and complete entry is required for a correct reference list, which is a
prerequisite for high-quality publications. Many programs for managing references
provide a mechanism to detect missing required fields and highlight these entries to
show the user that they are incomplete. However, this is not sufficient, because wrong
information is not detected and it is tedious to find the correct missing information. The
users have to check each reference entry manually to ensure correctness.
3 https://scholar.google.com
4 https://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography
N. Herzberg, C. Hochreiner, O. Kopp, J. Lenhard (Eds.): 10th ZEUS Workshop, ZEUS 2018,
Dresden, Germany, 8-9 February 2018, published at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2072
64 Oliver Kopp et al.
Hence, the goal of CloudRef is to provide a cloud-based web application for
collaborative reference management with to main features:
1. CloudRef provides quality assurance by voting on bibliographical references to
ensure complete and faultless references.
2. To support the cooperation of several people CloudRef enables to post comments
to literature at different levels of visibility.
Sect. 2 presents related work on the field. Subsequently, Sect. 3 outlines the demonstration
of CloudRef followed by a description of the implementation (Sect. 4). Finally, Sect. 5
provides a discussion and an outlook on future work.
2 Related Work
SoJa (Social JabRef [7]) introduces a social network among users. To establish a source
of high-quality entries, for each topic, a user maintaining these entries has to be chosen
in the community. There is no voting mechanism in place and comments can only be
shared by embedding them into the BIBTEX file. Haase et al. [10] assume that there are
BIBTEX databases with high-quality entries and that the issue is to identify duplicates
and to find entries. To tackle these issues, they present the system Bibster. SharRef [22]
focuses on sharing bibliographic data among groups and offers both a Web-based Client
and a Java-based Desktop Client. Quality of entries is assured by having bibliography
entries and automatically-updated shadows of them. There is no internal voting or
commenting system in place. SocioBiblog [17] relies on the authors publishing their
bibliographic data correctly on their homepages. There is no way presented on how to
ensure quality of the resulting BIBTEX entries. BibSonomy [3] and its variant PUMA [4]
offer to collect publications. It is possible to edit bibliographic data [6]. While there is a
history function5, all edits are immediatly visible so there is no suggestion process as we
propose. Academic search engines are surveyed by Ortega [16]. Additionally, there is
OverCite [19] aggregating search results in a CiteSeer-like way. These tools offer search
capabilities only and not a defined way to correct bibliographic entries. Beraka et al. [5]
present a system for exchanging bibliographic information of scientific review and survey
articles. Users can approve or disapprove bibliographic entries, but it is unclear how
contradicting votes are treated. For presentation of surveys, SurVis [1] can be used. It is
a read-only system without built-in functionalities of ensuring high-quality bibliographic
data. Tkaczyk et al. [20] surveyed on reference parsers. They convert free reference
text to a structured format. Thus, this is a way to get bibliographic data into a literature
management system, but it is not ensured that the parsed data is of high quality itself.
There is a movement on correctly citing software [18]. However, there is no quality
control process proposed. Finally, we investigated 15 popular literature management
systems6 and none of them offers 1) a voting system on bibliography entries and 2)
comments with dedicated visibility.
5 Example: https://www.bibsonomy.org/history/bibtex/57fe43734b18909a24bf5bf6608d2a09
6 https://ultimate-comparisons.github.io/ultimate-reference-management-software-
comparison
CloudRef – Towards Collaborative Reference Management 65
3 Demonstration
After startup, the current prototype CloudRef shows a table of all references (Fig. 1).
References with a green check mark have been reviewed and marked as high-quality. A
new reference can be input using a form-based editor or by uploading a BIBTEX file. A
Fig. 1. Entry table showing references.
Fig. 2. Suggestion for modification with voting possibility. The dialog is based on JabRef’s Merge
Entries Dialog, https://help.jabref.org/en/MergeEntries.
66 Oliver Kopp et al.
Fig. 3. PDF comments.
User Interface: Angular
R HTTP
Back end
REST Interface: Jersey
Data Access Layer: Java
File System
Relational Database: SQLite
Version Control System: Git
Fig. 4. Architecture of the CloudRef platform with implementation details. Notation: FMC [12].
suggestion for improvements can be done using the entry editor. A user can click on
“See suggestions for modifications” and a respective dialog is shown (Fig. 2). On the left
side, there are the voting buttons. The number indicates the number of votes. After five
positive votes by different users have been reached, the suggestion is merged.
In case a PDF is attached, comments on the PDF can be made (Fig. 3). A user can
set the visibility of his own comments to public or private. “Public” denotes that each
logged in user can see the comment and “private” denotes that the user exclusively can
see the comment. This helps newcomers to research to make private notes and the more
experienced researches to share their comments.
4 Implementation
The architecture of CloudRef including the used technologies is presented in Fig. 4. We
implemented CloudRef using Java and Angular. Regarding the storage, we decided to
CloudRef – Towards Collaborative Reference Management 67
put the comments into a SQL database, placing the PDFs directly into the filesystem, and
versioning the bibliography entries using git. Each suggestion becomes a new branch in
git. In case a suggestion is accepted, the branch is merged. This way, we did not have to
reinvent the whole branching and merging concept, but could rely on git’s possibilities.
The implementation is published at https://github.com/JabRef/cloudref/ and is
offered as Docker image at https://hub.docker.com/r/jabref/cloudref/.
5 Discussion and Outlook
Currently, CloudRef is an initial idea for collaborative reference management. CloudRef
is currently targeted at research groups with around ten persons. This ensures that quality
standards established in a group is followed. The group, however, has to define its quality
standards. For instance, there is currently no global agreement whether one should always
put the abbreviation of a conference name in parentheses to the end of the conference
title. The next natural step is to create a style guide for BIBTEX and to integrate a checker
into CloudRef similar to a GitHub pull request status checker [21].
When moving to a larger user base or offering CloudRef as public SaaS offering,
additional concepts for reviewing and maintaining references have to be developed and
the current voting concept has to be evaluated. For instance, the number of required
positive votes is a variable to evaluate.
The history of each BIBTEX entry is stored in the backend. Since there might be
different views on a BIBTEX entry, CloudRef should be able to show the history to the
user. This enables him to propose another version of the entry based on historic proposals.
To provide more features for high-quality references, we plan to use the logic package
of JabRef7, transpile it to JavaScript using jsweet8, and embed it in CloudRef. We also
plan to integrate CloudRef’s functionality into JabRef.
CloudRef is currently targeted as “Multiple Instances Service” [15]. To enable it
being hosted using as “Arbitrary Instances Service,” we are going to work on the backend
implementation and make CloudRef a real cloud-native application [14]. This especially
includes exchanging the storage layer by a PaaS one [13].
Finding related work is still a challenging task. To ease this, we aim for integrating a)
the recommender system Mr. DLib [2] into CloudRef in a similar way it has been done
for JabRef [9] or b) the user profile recommendations implemented by Bibster [11].
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