Study guide series: Using Scholarcy to manage your references
Managing your references is an important part of your academic journey. Citing others' work within your own is crucial for ensuring the validity of any points and arguments that you make in your work.
There are many different citation styles, including: APA, MLA, Chicago, and IEEE. On top of this, each of these styles has variations preferred by academic institutions, and publishers. This can be quite confusing, as the differences between different referencing styles can be quite subtle. Because of this, many researchers and academics opt to use a citation management tool to help them more easily and accurately cite their sources. This gives them more time and energy to focus on writing and proofreading their article instead of using that effort to manually write each citation and make sure the bibliography is ordered correctly. Some of these tools include Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley, and slot in easily to your literature discovery journey.
Scholarcy Library includes an integration with Zotero, which allows readers to import papers to their library directly from their Zotero library. The RIS export also allows readers to easily export any Scholarcy flashcards they wish to cite into a format that every citation manager can utilise. Scholarcy’s references export generates a zip file containing a .bib file as well as a .ris file, containing every reference found within a saved flashcard.
Readers can make use of both the Scholarcy and Zotero browser extensions when searching for new literature. The Scholarcy Browser extension allows users to seamlessly screen new literature in a condensed format, whilst remaining on the open webpage. You can then add that very article to your Zotero library by using the Zotero browser extension.
Using both browser extensions in combination can make a very efficient workflow for screening papers, storing the citation, and then easily citing them later.
“What if I already have a collection of papers either in my Scholarcy library, or on Zotero?”
Fear not, you can very easily import your collection of articles from Zotero into your Scholarcy Library.
Simply head to your Profile page in Scholarcy Library and sign in to your Zotero account – make sure to accept the default preferences so that Scholarcy can access your articles from the Zotero web library.
Then simply head to one of your libraries within Scholarcy, click import, choose the option for Zotero, and select the papers you wish to import from the Zotero picker.
How do I export my references from Scholarcy?
Exporting from Scholarcy Library to Zotero is just as easy. Start by finding the collection of papers you wish to cite or include in your bibliography. Select the papers you wish to cite by either clicking on the checkbox that appears on the left-hand side of the flashcard, or by clicking the select button found at the top of your open library. Click on export from the UI at the bottom of the page, then select RIS from the drop-down menu. Click on download so that theRIS file begins to download to your personal files. Clicking on the .ris file will result in the references being imported into your citation manager.
As easy as that, you can manage your references within Scholarcy. Waste no more time manually writing and editing citations and reference lists. And don’t forget – you can also export your Flashcards to a Word doc to generate an instant, fully formatted bibliography! Until next time…