APA Reference Expansions - Proof of Concept

[GamerChase]

One of the most annoying things of writing a college paper is having to write the references. I used to look for previous papers where I'd already written the reference, then copy, paste, and refine for the new paper. It probably took longer than just writing the reference from scratch, but I hated the idea of losing marks on APA formatting.

 

So as a concept, in my free time, I created a workflow to paste the complete reference into my paper so I only had to edit it for what I was citing this time. I found a character to start each keyword with that didn't pull anything else up in Alfred, so it starts with a clean list:

 

 

Then I type the name of the main author of the textbook (or I can press ⌘ and whatever number, obviously):

 

 

Hit Enter, and there it is:

 

 

 

I expect this will save me TONS of time.   Not sure if it'll be of any use to anyone else, but I'm proud of it, so I wanted to share. If you are interested, it can be downloaded here.

[Florian]

It'd be really awesome to have something equivalent tied to google scholar ! I'd definitely have a use for that ! 

[GamerChase]

It'd be really awesome to have something equivalent tied to google scholar ! I'd definitely have a use for that ! 

 

Unfortunately, I would have no idea how to do that.   Here's the innards of this workflow:

 

[rice.shawn]

This is a great concept for repetitive tasks.

 

I like the idea of working with Google Scholar to get a citation (I'd need to look into that a bit more), or it could be good to have it integrate with a Zotero database or a Papers2 database. GS would be good for general citations (here is a python parser: http://www.icir.org/christian/scholar.html), but GS' Terms of Use are a bit strange, and it looks like they might ban people for misuse (http://jacobjwalker.effectiveeducation.org/blog/2013/02/10/petition-to-open-google-scholar-to-automated-queries-and-release-its-api/).

 

I'll try to look into this more. Thanks for the good idea.

[dinobib]

I would find a workflow which look into the Sente reference Manager really useful.

But I didn't know how it could be done.

Anyone could help?