Save papers and pages from your browser with the ScholarThread extension
Add the paper or page you are looking at to your library in one click, with its PDF when your browser can reach it: install the Chrome extension, save, choose where saves go, and what to do when something goes wrong.
Most papers are found in a browser: a publisher's article page, a university library catalogue, a preprint server, a PDF someone linked. The ScholarThread extension for Chrome adds what you are looking at to your library in one click, so you do not download the file, rename it and upload it yourself.
Install it and sign in
Install ScholarThread from the Chrome Web Store, then pin its icon from Chrome's puzzle-piece menu so it is always one click away.
There is no separate account. Sign in on scholarthread.com in the same browser, by any method, and the extension uses that session. A free account is enough, with the normal plan limits. If you are not signed in, the popup says so and offers Sign in to ScholarThread; sign in on the page that opens, then come back to the paper.
Save a paper
Open an article page (a publisher's, a library's or a repository's) or a PDF in a tab, and click the ScholarThread icon. The popup shows what it found: the kind of item, the title, the authors, the journal and year, the DOI, and whether a PDF is available.
Click Save to ScholarThread. The popup reads the PDF, uploads it, and then says Saved to your library. The PDF is downloaded by your own browser, with your own access: if the publisher lets you in through a university login or a library proxy, so does the extension, and ScholarThread never sees your password. PDFs up to 50 MB are saved with the paper.
What happens next is the same as for any paper you add: ScholarThread identifies it and fills in the rest of its details in the background, and it shows up in your library, searchable, usable in Chat and in your knowledge graph. If you save the same paper twice, the popup says Already in your library and nothing is duplicated.
Save a page that is not a paper
On a page that is not a paper (a blog post, a report, documentation), the button reads Save as web reference. ScholarThread keeps the page's address, title and site, the author and date when the page gives them, and the page's readable text when it can be extracted, and files it like any other item.
Choose where saves go
Saves go to a collection called Imported from web (created on your first save) until you choose another. Click Settings in the popup, or open the extension's options page, to change it.
You can pick any of your own collections, including nested ones; Zotero collections are not offered. The second option, Save the PDF when the page links one, is on by default. Turn it off to save only the reference details; a PDF you open in a tab is always uploaded, because the PDF is the thing you are saving.
When something goes wrong
The popup says what happened and, where there is a way on, offers it:
- You are not signed in. Sign in on scholarthread.com and click the icon again.
- The site did not return a PDF, or asked you to sign in. Some sites only serve the PDF inside their own viewer. Open the PDF in its own tab and click the icon there, or choose Save without the PDF to save the reference details now.
- The PDF is larger than 50 MB, or your attachment storage is full. Choose Save without the PDF to save the reference details, or free some space and try again.
- The page text could not be read. Choose Save without the page text.
- The page changed. Click the icon again.
What the extension can see
The extension reads a page only when you click its icon. It does not watch the sites you visit and cannot see your browsing history. When you click Save it sends the page's bibliographic details (title, authors, journal, DOI and address), the PDF if there is one, and the readable text of web pages to your ScholarThread library. Apart from that, it only talks to ScholarThread to sign you in and to read and save your settings. There is no analytics and no advertising. Chrome shows its permissions as "Read and change your data on clerk.scholarthread.com and api.scholarthread.com": those are the sign-in and the ScholarThread servers, and nothing else. The full details are in the privacy policy.
The short version
Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store, sign in on scholarthread.com, open a paper, click the icon and click Save to ScholarThread. To bring over a whole library at once, connect Zotero instead; for papers you already have as a file, a DOI or a BibTeX entry, see adding a paper.