Add a paper by pasting its BibTeX entry

If you already have a BibTeX entry for a paper — copied from a .bib file, exported from a citation manager, or grabbed straight off a publisher's "Cite" button — you no longer need to retype it into ScholarThread's Add Paper form field by field. Paste the entry, and ScholarThread does the rest.

How it works

Open Add paper in your Library and switch to Paste BibTeX. Drop in a single entry:

@article{smith2024,
  title = {Attention and Working Memory in Distributed Teams},
  author = {Smith, Jane and Ochoa, Luis},
  journal = {Journal of Cognitive Science},
  year = {2024}
}

Hit Add paper, and the reference lands in your library immediately — no waiting on a network round trip for every field to validate, no re-keying an author list you already had correctly formatted somewhere else.

Classification happens in the background

Parsing the BibTeX entry is the easy part; understanding the paper is the more interesting one. Once the paper is added, ScholarThread reaches out to OpenAlex to classify it — concept tags, related-field information, and citation metadata all get filled in without you doing anything further.

Because that classification is a background step, the paper first appears with a small "classifying…" indicator rather than pretending everything is settled instantly. Give it a moment and refresh the paper's detail view — the concept tags appear as soon as classification finishes, typically within a few seconds.

If classification doesn't turn up a match, or OpenAlex is temporarily rate-limiting anonymous requests, the paper's detail view offers an Enrich now button so you can retry it yourself later — you're never stuck waiting on an automatic process with no way to nudge it. If you're hitting rate limits often, setting your own free OpenAlex API key puts you in OpenAlex's polite pool, which mostly makes this a non-issue.

Why paste instead of import a file

BibTeX-paste is deliberately the fast path for the case you already have the entry as text — a single reference you're adding mid-writing session, or one you copied out of a colleague's document. For getting a whole library across in one go, connecting Zotero or importing a .bib/.ris file is still the better tool for the job. Paste-BibTeX fills the gap in between: one reference, no context switch, no retyping.

The short version

Have a BibTeX entry? Paste it into Add Paper's Paste BibTeX mode instead of typing the fields out by hand. The paper appears right away, and ScholarThread fills in concept tags and metadata from OpenAlex in the background — with a manual retry available if classification needs a second attempt.