If you’ve ever read an academic article and wanted to follow the trail of sources it cites, you know the pain of searching one line at a time. Proposed tool lets you copy (or extract automatically from a document) a block of references, tick the ones you want, and instantly bulk-search them on Google Scholar.
The problem
As a student or an academic researcher, you probably often find yourself in a situation where you have an article or a thesis in front of you that is highly relevant to your research. In order to build your literature library (e.g. in Zotero), you may like to look up some of the sources the given publication cites, and determine whether they are also relevant to your topic. Unfortunately, none of the tools currently available to academics have the exact functionality to help you speed up this step. You may have a Zotero extension for your browser that lets you save the source you are currently viewing in Google Scholar directly into the database, but in order to get to that step you still need to copy the references one by one and search them in Google Scholar. This is a straightforward enough task, but it is tedious. What if we could have a little handy tool to bridge this gap and streamline our literature search process?
The proposed solution
I propose a tool that would, as a minimum, easily extract references from a paper, clean them up to remove extra line breaks and whatever extraneous characters there may be in a PDF that may interfere with searching, and keep them in a special “staging area”, from which the user can select the items that look interesting, and search several sources at a time. At that point, the user can save the relevant sources into the database using existing tools such as Zotero Connector.
There is of course a lot of space for some nice extras, such as BibTeX export, AI summaries to give the user a hint about how each source is used in the paper, etc.
Existing prototype
I made an open-source prototype called RefTraceback, it can be downloaded here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/academic-tech-toolbox/
It’s an AutoHotkey script with a basic GUI. It can currently:
- Accept bibliography or entire paper pasted from an external source (e.g. from a DOCX file)
- Open a PDF file (using external free console tool pdftotext (http://www.xpdfreader.com/) to convert PDF to text)
- Separate bibliography from the rest of the paper
- Do some basic repair to join multi-line references extracted from a PDF
- Save the list as text, and open it later
- Let the user edit the list in text format in case the repair process missed something
- Let the user switch to “select mode” and tick the references they want
- Bulk-search selected references (or the whole list)
Screenshots
Limitations
- Clunky interface – I can easily tweak it in AutoHotkey to suit my personal preferences, but this software is hardly ready for public use.
- Google Scholar may challenge you with captchas if you open too many tabs. This is annoying, but seems to be OK if you search a handful at a time, not a huge number. I reached out to Google telling them to stop discriminating robots, because some of them may be here to help us 🙂 but didn’t get a response.
Existing alternatives
No direct alternatives that I know of. Some tools do something similar (e.g. extract references from a document and import them to Zotero), but none let you search in bulk and choose to only import the things you want.
I reached out to Zotero community, and they pointed me to this plugin: https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference
It looks like a useful tool, but there still remain some gaps in its functionality that could be filled to the benefit of academic researchers.
Looking for:
- Feedback and suggestions – the project is very open-ended and could be shaped by advice from community.
- Collaboration – anyone who knows how to code Zotero plugins, or has ideas how to create a standalone program – please reach out!
Dear MuiseDestiny, please let me know if you’d like to merge this idea with your existing plugin, we can work on it together. Also, I can help with English-language documentation – your project is already pretty famous in the Zotero community, but this way it could reach an even wider audience. - Anyone who can tackle this task – I really don’t mind if someone who knows what they’re doing takes charge of the project, or makes their own version.
Submitted by: Ilia Leikin
Looking for: advice, collaboration, someone to take over the project
Hashtags: #Academic #Bibliography #Zotero
Status: newly submitted
🔍 AI Evaluation
🧠 Concept Overview
This project tackles a common bottleneck in academic research: the time-consuming process of individually searching references cited in scholarly documents. The proposed tool enables users to extract, clean, and batch-search references, streamlining the early stages of literature review. An optional “staging area” allows for reference triage before importing into citation managers like Zotero, adding an extra layer of utility and organization.
✅ Novelty & Differentiation
While tools exist to extract references or manage citations, this concept stands out by integrating extraction, triage, and bulk search into a single workflow. Unlike existing plugins that focus solely on reference harvesting or one-at-a-time lookup, this tool focuses on usability and researcher convenience, particularly in exploratory or investigative phases of a project.
🛠 Prototype & Technical Feasibility
A working prototype has been developed using AutoHotkey, offering the following core features:
- Parsing and cleaning reference lists from copied text
- Allowing users to select specific references of interest
- Performing batch searches on Google Scholar by opening each result in a browser tab
While rudimentary in interface, the prototype effectively demonstrates the feasibility of the idea. Future iterations could benefit from improved front-end usability and deeper integration with academic tools.
🚀 Potential Enhancements
To fully realize its potential, future versions of this tool could consider:
- User Interface Improvements – Building a standalone app or browser extension with a more refined user experience
- Zotero Integration – Allowing selected references to be imported directly into a user’s citation database
- AI-Powered Assistance – Using AI to summarize or rank reference relevance
- Broader Database Compatibility – Expanding search functionality to include platforms like Semantic Scholar, PubMed, or Crossref
🤝 Collaboration Opportunities
The idea is open source and currently seeking collaborators with experience in plugin development, user interface design, or academic software ecosystems. Feedback from researchers, students, and developers would help guide the next stages of development. There is also an opportunity for a team to take over and expand the project.
