Scholia Connector

Save a paper you are reading in Chrome straight into a Scholia project, with its PDF.

Scholia Connector saves the paper you are reading in Chrome into your own Scholia library — the right project, the full reference, and the PDF — without leaving the page. It is the browser half of Scholia, a local-first reader and research notebook for macOS. The library lives in a folder on your own disk. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to make. REQUIRES THE SCHOLIA APP This extension does nothing on its own. It needs Scholia for macOS running on the same computer, and it will tell you so plainly if it is not. CHOOSE WHERE IT GOES The popup lists every project in your library, and remembers the one you used last. Filing a paper under "Thesis — chapter 3" instead of a single undifferentiated pile takes one click, and you can make a new project from the popup without leaving the page. IT READS THE PAGE FOR YOU Title, authors, year, journal or conference, DOI and abstract, taken from what the publisher already puts in the page. Anything still missing is looked up from the DOI at Crossref. Every field stays editable before you save, because a landing page is often wrong about the venue — and because a PDF opened straight in a browser tab has no metadata at all to read. AND KEEPS THE PDF The PDF is fetched using your own browser session, so a paper you can read through your institution's subscription is a paper Scholia can keep. When a download does not work — a paywall, an expiring link — the reference is still saved, and you attach the PDF in Scholia later. You never lose the citation. NOTICES WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE A paper already in the chosen project, matched by DOI or by title, is recognised. The popup offers to open it rather than save it twice. Right-click any page and choose "Save to Scholia" to file it into the project you used last, without opening the popup at all. WHAT IT CAN REACH Papers travel to Scholia over a loopback connection on your own machine, which nothing on the network can reach, and only after you have approved this browser once from a dialog in the app itself. The extension reads the page in front of you when you open its popup — nothing else, and no browsing history. Access to every site is optional, off until you turn it on, and needed only to download a PDF that lives on a different host from the article. The only thing that ever leaves your computer is a paper's DOI, sent to api.crossref.org to fill in missing authors, year or journal. That is a single switch in the extension's settings, and turning it off stops it completely. OPEN SOURCE The extension and the app are open source under the MIT licence. https://github.com/haimol/Scholia