A Chrome plugin for the grad student overwhelmed with background reading and tracking.
This extension is useful for creating a cheatsheet of key ideas and the corresponding citation.
- Find a paper on one of the supported sites:
- Wiley Online Library
- ScienceDirect
- PubMed
- PubMed Central (PMC)
- ASM Journal of Bacteriology
- Highlight anything you want on the page
- Copy
- Paste into any word processor
- Wow is that an automatic parenthetical citation that magically got attached to the clipboard? Yes, yes it is.
Reference managers are great. I loved Mendeley.
But when you read a paper and come across a key idea that you really need for your thesis, and that paper leads to 10 other papers you need to read, it's hella annoying to open up Mendeley and add the reference there every time. Your brain has better things to do!
Also, while it is possible to write little notes on the info page for the papers saved in your Mendeley library, you need to click on each article one at a time to see what I wrote for that particular paper.
I had specific ideas I needed from papers, and being the good little grad student I am, I wanted to make sure to attribute the idea to the correct author. And using Mendeley to store the key ideas for each paper was just too inefficient.
So I started copying and pasting the key idea sentence from each paper, and citing them parenthetically in-text as you would in APA style. And I got tired of manually typing out the author's names and the publication year, so I wrote a short script to automate that process.
Having said that, this was strictly for putting together a quick cheatsheet of ideas and their authors. If you're writing your actual thesis, I recommend using Mendeley extension for MS Word, as it catalogs and inserts the correct citation for you.