Add a paper by pasting its BibTeX entry
Skip the manual-entry form entirely — paste a BibTeX record from your LaTeX file, a citation manager export, or a publisher page, and ScholarThread adds the paper and classifies it in the background.
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 or Google Scholar'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. (For all three ways to add a paper, see Add a paper: from a PDF, a DOI or a BibTeX entry.)
How it works
In your Library, open the Import paper menu in the toolbar (1) and choose From BibTeX… (2).
The Import from BibTeX dialog opens. 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}
}
Click Import, and the reference lands in your library — no re-keying an author list you already had correctly formatted somewhere else. If you already have the paper (same DOI or title), ScholarThread reuses it instead of creating a duplicate, so importing twice is safe.
The same Import paper menu also offers From a PDF file… and From a DOI…, which are handy when you have the file or just the identifier rather than a BibTeX record.
Pasting, or loading a .bib file
The dialog also has a Choose a .bib file button, which loads the file's contents into the box so you can check them before importing. The dialog takes one entry at a time: if what you paste or load contains several, it tells you "This looks like N entries. Only the first will be imported; the rest are ignored." and, after the import, says how many were ignored. Importing a whole .bib file in one go is not supported yet.
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 and related metadata get filled in without you doing anything further.
Because that is a background step, the paper's detail view first shows "Classifying this paper — concepts and details will appear shortly…" rather than pretending everything is settled instantly. The view updates by itself; the Concepts 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 requests, the paper's detail view has 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 hit rate limits often, setting your own free OpenAlex API key gives you your own allowance, which mostly makes this a non-issue.
Why paste instead of import a library
BibTeX import 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 is the better tool for the job; and if you want to understand the formats you are pasting, see BibTeX, RIS and CSL explained. Import from BibTeX fills the gap in between: one reference, no context switch, no retyping.
The short version
Have a BibTeX entry? Open Import paper → From BibTeX…, paste it (or choose a .bib file with one entry), and click Import. The paper appears right away, and ScholarThread fills in concepts and metadata from OpenAlex in the background — with Enrich now available if classification needs a second attempt.