A practical problem in the literature review process is when the user comes across a citation in a document they are reading which looks interesting. The user will need to decide whether to ignore the citation, highlight it somehow for follow up later, follow the citation and either simply add it to a list or management software as another item to the stack or stop reading the current document read the cited document then and there.
To deal with this, the Liquid Reader will therefore allow the following action when a user comes across a citation in a standard PDF document:
The user selects the cited text, including the bracketed citation name & date or the superscript number and chooses a ‘Lift’ command. The software then (automatically and invisibly to the user) jumps to the end of the document for the References/bibliography section where it scans for the reference and uses the extra information to search for it online.
The search results is then presented to the user who can choose to tag and colour code the citation and/or write a note.
If possible, the user can also download the document at this stage. On ‘Save,’ the citation is added to the user’s list of literature review documents for access by any of the above meta-information (where it was found, text in the quote, tag, date found etc.) for opening in the Liquid Reader or Liquid View. Import in a citation management system is also an option.
This will deal with the issue of ‘analog-hyperlinks’ where attention becomes diluted by (potentially useful) distractions by providing the simple function to Lift the cited document to access in a findable way later, while at the same time building up a picture of the knowledge space.
Documents using the suggested Rich PDF formats will be able to support this process more robustly but it should be possible to enable on most PDF documents.
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