Brad Collins has a nice post on collecting BibTeX citations. As he notes, there are plenty of articles on how to generate a citation in Org mode from a BibTeX entry but not on how to gather the entries to begin with.
He starts with a simple Org mode template to capture the citation once you retrieve it from Google Scholar. The idea is that you copy it from Google Scholar and paste it into the capture buffer. If you do this a lot, it would be pretty easy to write a bit of Elisp to automatically copy the citation, bring up the capture buffer, and paste the entry into it.
If you’re using Firefox or Chrome you can make things easier by installing the Google Scholar button and then follow Collins’ workflow. If you’re on a Mac using Safari—or, I suppose, on Windows using one of the Microsoft browsers—his basic workflow still works. Just follow these steps:
- Go to the Google Scholar page
- Search for the paper you’re interested in
- Click the “Cite” link at the bottom of the article description
- Choose BibTeX in the popup
- A tab will open with the plain text citation in BibTeX format
- Copy and paste the citation as described in Collins’ post
If you’re writing a lot of papers for school or for work, Collins’ method is an easy way to build up your bibliography database. Even if gathering a citation is an occasional thing, knowing how to use Google Scholar to retrieve it is useful.