Importing Google Scholar Results To Reference Tracker

30 January 2010

If you are a writer, student or academic, you have no doubt used Google Scholar, Google's extremely useful search engine for journal articles, books and other scholarly materials. If you use our Reference Tracker application to manage your references and citations, you may find it useful to know how to import articles found via Google Scholar into Reference Tracker documents. This guide will show you how.

References from Google Scholar are imported to Reference Tracker using the BibTex (.bib) format. This feature needs to be turned on in your preferences for Google Scholar. So, to begin, visit http://scholar.google.com/ and click on the "Scholar Preferences" link.

At the bottom of the preferences page, there is a section titled "Bibliography Manager". In the section select the option "Show links to import citations into BibTex", then click the "Save Preferences" button.

Now when you search in Google Scholar you will see a link after each result titled "Import into BibTex" These preferences will be saved, so you will not need to repeat the preceding steps when you subsequently want to import search results to Reference Tracker.

Clicking on the link with show you the BibTex reference data for the article or book.

Save this reference by sleeking "File > Save As…" or "File > Save Page As…" in your browser, and save the file to your Desktop. (Note, if your browser wants to append a '.txt' extension to the end of the file name, you should remove it. The file extension should be '.bib')

Now open the Reference Tracker document you wish to import the reference into. With that document open, select "File > Import > BibTex/RIS File…"

Select your saved BibTex file in the file browser and click the "Open" button. The reference from Google Scholar will now appear in your Reference Tracker document.