Export all papers cited in a MS doc to a paperpile folder

Hi, new to the forum and not sure if this has been brought up much in the past. I wanted to make a suggestion to make it possible to export the collection of papers cited in a particular manuscript (using the MS plugin) to a folder in your Paperpile library.

Like many I have a large manuscript (aka Manuscript #1) that I’ve been editing over and over for months, and I try to keep track of the sources in Paperpile by manually adding the papers to a “Manuscript #1” folder in my account. But, it becomes hard to keep track when I’m adding and deleting sources while writing, then I need to take the time to manually go through my works cited paper by paper and cross-reference with the folder.

What I imagine is a function within the MS plugin to “export sources to folder,” which then could prompt you to “choose folder,” returning a list of the folders you currently have in your library plus the option to “make a new folder.” I don’t think it would be necessary to have the folders auto-updating, as you might have any number of unimportant manuscripts with works cited collections that you don’t care to have in your library at that moment. But having the option to collect the sources from your current biblography within Paperpile would be extremely useful!

I’m also trying to imagine what would be the best way to then update the folder, say if I create and export all my sources to the “Manuscript #1” folder on Monday, then delete and add some sources on Wednesday. Maybe I just export again into the “Manuscript #1” folder, and it overwrites what was put there on Monday. Or maybe there should be an additional option to “update an existing folder.” I suppose this would make it more obvious to users that the folder will now be changed to exactly match the current works cited of the document.

Is this a common request? Are there useful work-arounds? Thanks :slight_smile:

Welcome to our forum, @Morgan_O, and thank you for sharing the details of your use case. We have a partial solution to your problem. In the Paperpile menu in Word, go to Settings and Tools > Document Settings and click Move to, where you can type the name of the folder/label in your library that you wish to move all the citations in your document.

But this feature doesn’t automatically update the folder in your library each time you add or remove a reference from your document - each time, you click Move to, it will add the new references, but it will not remove ones no longer in your document.

I’ve added your +1 for this request to our internal feature tracker for consideration by the team. The team is currently rewriting our Google Docs plugin, and dynamically linking a folder to a Google doc is planned for that, so it will eventually follow for the Word plugin.

Hi @suzanne thanks for the quick and helpful answer! This is almost exactly the feature I was imagining, only not so intiutive to find. And I am not bothered that it won’t remove sources that have been deleted from the document (I can understand how deletions would be unhelpful in other uses for the feature), but in cases where I want to make sure the folder is completely current I will just clear it beforehand and then use the Move to… command.

Thanks, I’m really happy with the solution!

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