Mark as Read + Citation Reference Preview

Hi,

I just started using Paperpile and so far it works pretty well :+1:
Here are two questions that I have:

  • Is there a way to get visual feedback in my library of which papers I have already read?

  • Can I somehow preview the citation as it would appear in my references section?
    This would be very helpful because at the moment I always go the extra mile and add the citation to a Google Doc and click “format citations” to check that.

Thanks!

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There is no built-in way, but you can use labels to keep track of this manually. You can also spice up these labels with emoji:
image

To get a formatted citation, select the paper(s) and click the “Cite” button (or press Cmd/Ctrl + C). The papers will be formatted in your default style, which you can change via the triangle menu next to the Cite button.

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Hi Jason,

thanks. Both suggestions work great!

Is there a way to update the library or plugin? Because when I am writing on my Google doc and adding a new reference to Paperpile I can not find it using the Paperpile Add-on or clicking Paperpile-Add citation.

Do you have any news on this?
I added a new paper a couple of hours ago and still can not cite it to my Google Doc because Paperpile wont find it…

That sounds unrelated. Does the title contain any special characters?

As a general trick, you can search using the citekey, which you can copy by selecting the reference in Paperpile and pressing Ctrl + K.

It seems like this was a glitch. After restarting Chrome it worked fine!

Can you explain to me when I should press the “Format Citations” button? I just noted that this changes some of the citations and I would like to know when it is the best time to do that :slight_smile:

You should format your citations whenever:

  1. You wish to apply your chosen citation style to the citations in the document.
  2. You wish to review the formatting of the citations and the bibliography.
  3. You wish to pull metadata changes from your library into the document.

In general, you can get quite far without ever formatting the citations. In theory, it could be done as a last step, but in practice, this last step can take a while due to author disambiguations in the in-text citations, and bits of missing metadata in the bibliography, so it can be worth checking every once in a while during the writing process.

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Thats good to know. Thank you!

One of my first requests on this forum (August 2014) was for a “read status” filter. Using tags is sub-optimal because to change status you have to not only add a new tag, but remove the old one. It would also be nice to filter a folder as easily as you can with other options in the filter menu, such as whether or not they have a PDF.

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To filter a folder, first select the folder, then apply the filter. Unless I have misunderstood your intention here?

@jason
Exactly what I would like to do! But you have to add the filter options first… Please see the attached mockup image:

THIS. :point_up_2:t5::point_up_2:t5::point_up_2:t5:

A history of “Opens” would also be useful.

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I have just noticed that on one citation Paperpile writes (A. B. Author, 2010) instead of (Author, 2010) even tough the author name is saved correctly. Do you have any idea why this might happen?