Systematic Literature Review Mode for Emacs

SLIRM is a little tool for annotating entries in BibTeX files and is designed for performing systematic literature reviews. Everything is happening in plain-text BibTeX files, such that you can easily work together and synchronize via Git or the like.

Installation

MELPA

SLIRM is available on MELPA!

Manually

To install SLIRM manually, clone this repository (e.g. into ~/slirm):

$ cd
$ git clone [email protected]:fbie/slirm.git
 Cloning into 'slirm'...
 Checking connectivity... done.
$ ls slirm/
 README.md slirm.el

Then, add the following or similar to your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/slirm/")
(load "slirm.el")

(require 'slirm)

Usage

Open a BibTeX file with C-x C-f. From within the new buffer, run M-x slirm-start RET. The BibTeX buffer will be replaced with a SLIRM buffer, which shows the first not yet reviewed entry.

Press SPC and enter yes or no to keep or reject the entry. You will automatically proceed to the next first not yet reviewed entry.

Further navigation consists of:

• n: Next entry
• p: Previous entry
• C-n: Next not yet reviewed entry
• C-f: First not yet reviewed entry
• C-c C-t: Show full text PDF. This might download the file and cache it locally.
• C-c C-n: Edit notes in the mini-buffer.
• C-c C-u: Browse to the current entry's URL.

Extending URL Handlers

SLIRM automatically downloads the abstract and link to the full text PDF, if available. This is done by just scraping the HTML file returned by getting the URL stored in the BibTeX url field. Currently, there are only handlers for ACM, but you can add more handlers, one handler for the abstract and one for the full text link similarly to this:

(slirm-add-handlers "acm.org" 'slirm--acm-get-links 'slirm--acm-get-abstract)

slirm--acm-get-links returns a pair of URLs, where the car is the link to the abstract and cdr the link to the full-text file. It may be necessary to generalize this a bit further, such that the handler itself writes the values to the current entry.

TODOs

• Download and cache full text PDF.
• Export accepted entries to new file.
• Default handlers for unknown base URLs to prevent crashing.
• Edit annotations.
• Extend navigation to next/previous/first accepted/rejected entry.
• Add options for auto-commit with Magit.
• Run slirm-start with filename as parameter.
• Generalize downloading of full-text URLs and abstracts.