Documon: an intelligent web platform to identify, recommend, and manage material relevance of research publications

Abstract

Access to knowledge has been widely broadened and made easy via various new technologies compared to how it was 30 years ago. This includes various sources that provide online access to thousands of research publications. As convenient as it may, dealing with large numbers of these reference materials can be quite a hassle while managing them can be even more so. Even though a combination of utility tools and reference management tools can be used to tackle this issue, it involves an unnecessary amount of manual work and time. The main goal of this project is to take a smarter approach of creating a web application that can be used to provide an interface for researchers to identify the material relevance of a research publication without having to read through the entire thing while also providing a centralized way for managing reference materials via the application itself. This eliminates a very common practice of using different applications such as MS. Word, Excel, and Reference management tools. “Documon” differs from existing solutions including available Reference management tools given its simplicity, automated workflows, “Research on The Go” features as well as the overall application utilizing Natural Language Processing, Web scraping, content suggestions and Information extraction using document patterns in PDFs.