Academic Research – searching from your reference list

If you (like me) find chasing down references for academic assignments to be a challenge then you may be interested in this. My use-case is the exploring stage where you would like to save a reference then search Scholar for that author and/or search on the title of the article.

I have just enabled Refworks references to link back to Google Scholar search. Google Scholar (which links neatly to your university’s library) naturally pairs with Refworks (I am currently on a 30-day free trial of this magic service for accumulating references from Scholar) But vanilla Refworks is a deadend. But help is at hand — now you use a greasemonkey script (greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox browser) to link back to Scholar search!

The script is called œRefworks link to Google Scholar and it makes Refworks.com link back to Scholar! As shown here …
refworks with the script enabled

Without the script enabled, the Refworks view normally shows like this …
refworks without the script enabled

Enjoy!

This script just scratches the surface of what is possible!