How is the new sidebar add-on different from Paperpile’s existing Google Docs integration?
When you use the Paperpile web application and have the Chrome extension installed you will automatically see a “Paperpile” menu and icon in your Google Docs. These functions provided through the Chrome extension let you insert and format citations and bibliographies.
In addition, you can install the new Google Docs sidebar add-on from the Google Docs Webstore. It will add a menu “Paperpile” under “Add-ons”. To open the sidebar click “Add-ons > Paperpile > Manage citations”.
Will it replace the existing plugin? Do I have to switch?
No, the sidebar add-on is optional and is not meant to replace any of the functionality of the Chrome extension.
So why should I use the new add-on?
The add-on is free, works on any browser and does not require a Paperpile account. Everyone can add citations and collaborate with you even if he or she doesn’t want to use Paperpile as their reference manager (yet).
The sidebar gives you a better overview of existing citations in a document and makes it easier to cite multiple papers from the same search result.
Full EndNote compatibility. You can export a document and its citations in a format that is understood by EndNote so you can seamlessly continue to work with Word and EndNote (we don’t judge…)
You can export your document and citations to LaTeX and BibTeX.
You can create a clean copy without any Paperpile specific citation markup.
The “Unformat” option allows you to revert citations back to the blue placeholders making them easier to spot in your document.
Why can’t I do X in the sidebar?
The main purpose of the sidebar add-on is to enable everyone – Paperpile user or not – to collaborate with you. So it offers a very basic set of features most of which are not meant to replace the much richer feature set of the full Paperpile application you already know.
That said, the add-on offers many new technical possibilities to improve the experience also for Paperpile users. We’ve already added some frequently requested features (see above) that were technically impossible before.
We have plans to add more functionality once we see how the add-on is adopted and used in the wild. Any feedback is of course more than welcome. Just post in this forum.
So how does the new export to Word/EndNote actually work?
Maybe, some words of guidance on how to use the new Endnote doc export would be useful. I dont have word or endnote anymore but colleagues do. I´ve just exported a GDoc-ENDNOTE file to word and it appears to contain the embedded Endnote tokens, but the bibliography at the end is blank. I expect this will be generated by Word/Endnote, but do I also have to export my whole Paperpile library in Endnote format to the recipient so that the tokens have something to match?
Great addon apart from this confusion by the way. Great for multiple citations, and unformat is great to check whether there are any plaintext references forgotten in the text. Pity that it overwrites the Table of Content sidebar (or any other sidebar – but guess thats a GDocs issue).
If it was possible we would of course have use more restricted permissions. The Google AppScript system unfortunately does not make this possible. If you have by any chance contacts to Google , you should bring this up!
The add-on needs to read and write your documents otherwise it can’t insert citations.
All the new EndNote or BibTeX export feature or the “clean copy” feature require us to create a copy in your Google Drive. AppScript for whatever reasons asks for complete Google Drive access just for that.
AppScript generates the permissions automatically and there is nothing we can do about it. We’ve looked into that.
An important note for everyone reading this: The add-on runs exclusively on Google’s servers and we only transmit the citation codes of the in-text citations to our servers to create the citations. So all we see from your document are the references. Everything else remains with Google. That’s completely open and transparent as you can see the network traffic of what the add-on transmits.
I was wondering if there would be a link between paperpile sidebar and paperpile app itself, so that one can directly search and add from the library instead of exporting and importing (I know this feature exists when you use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+P but does it exist on the sidebar ?).
Also it would be nice if you could include an ‘Add’ button so that its possible to add what papers you might want to cite. Right now it’s just cite directly from search which makes it inconvenient say if I want to just make a list of papers I might want to cite.
Yes there is. The items from your library will be presented first in blue with the heading “Items from your library”
You can just delete the citation from the text. The reference will remain stored with the document and it will be listed in green under “Items from this document”.
You need to be signed in with the same Google account that you use for Paperpile. Otherwise the add-on does not know who you are and can’t show results from your library.
You should see the same results as you see when you use the “P” icon in Google Docs that brings up the citation dialog in the middle of the screen.
Please test with a search term which you are sure that it exists. Also if it’s already cited it’s now shown again under “My library” but only in “From this documents”
