Find all citations mentioned in a document. Build and check your reference lists quickly and easily.
PapersCited is a program designed to help you with writing and reviewing reference lists in your scientific articles. It reads through a document of your choice and notes every time something is cited. At the end, it lists all of those citations in alphabetical order, omitting duplicate entries. You can also save them in an Excel or textual file. Now you can easily go through your reference list and note if you cited something but didn't include it or, conversely, you wrote a reference that isn't cited anywhere in the article. It is also handy for writing a reference list from stratch.
PapersCited handles APA style citations excellently, but Chicago style and similar should work as well. The program was built with texts written in English and Croatian in mind. Some sources may be detected incorrectly in other languages.
Tested on Windows 10 using .docx, .txt, .doc and .pdf files.
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- Download the latest version of PapersCited.zip from the Releases tab, to the right. (Windows only)
- Extract the archive in a folder of your choosing.
- The newly extracted folder contains an example document and the Paperscited executable. Run PapersCited.exe.
- Click the Choose document button and select a file you want to analyse.
- After inspecting the results, you can save them as .xlsx or .txt via appropriate buttons.
The program comes with a file called "example.docx" if you want to experiment with the program and preview what the output looks like.
For non-Windows OS, please see Running the latest version of the Python script.
The first column in the Excel file is empty so you can easily mark certain citations as "OK" or "needs double-checking" when reviewing a reference list.
Longer citations appear in a separate column. These encompass citations listing three authors, or authors with two surnames (e.g. Van Selm and Jankowsky (2006)). However, the potential for superfluous words being recognised as proper surnames is somewhat higher here, so they are displayed separately.
- If you get an error reading .doc or .pdf files on Windows, you might need to download additional libraries for working with these files. See help_with_libraries.txt for detailed instructions on how to do so.
- Secondary citations ("XX 2010, as cited in YY 2012"). YY 2012 is detected correctly. However, XX 2010 also gets recorded as a primary source. XX 2010 should not be included in the reference list.
- In Croatian, different declinations of the author's surnames get detected as different authors.
- Surnames with three or more words, such as van der Flier, will get recorded only as the last word or last two words - Kappe and van der Flier (2010) will be recorded as Flier 2010, skipping the first author! These require special attention when writing or reviewing a reference list. Multiple surnames with an "-", however, will be recorded correctly.
- Similarly, when citing organizations, laws and other documents, it possible that only the end of the full name gets recorded. World Health Organization (2000) will be recorded as Organization 2000, with Health Organization 2000 as a separate suggestion. (WHO 2000 would be fine, though.) So if you are working with these kinds of sources, extra attention is needed.
- Copying text from a PDF to clipboard might yield unexpected characters, such as ´c instead of č. This is a matter of the individual PDF file's encoding, however, it might lead to incorrect text scanning.
If you use an operating system other than Windows, or want the very latest changes on this Github, you'll need to install Python and the dependencies listed below.
This program was written using Python 3.9.12. It requires the following modules:
textract, xlsxwriter, regex, docx2python, tkinter
To install them (on Windows), open Powershell, type "pip install textract" and press Enter. After that, follow with "pip install xlsxwriter" and so on.
Before running the script, install the Miniconda distribution to run Python scripts on your computer:
https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
Keep the default values for all the settings except the checkbox asking to put Miniconda on your Path variable. That is off by default, turn it on.
After installing Miniconda, open the start menu and search for Windows Powershell, then open it. Install PIP, the package manager for Python. Then install the modules required by the program, as described in Dependencies.
With all that done, the PapersCited.py script should run when double-clicked. If it asks you which program to open it with, choose to look for another app on this PC and navigate to C:\Users\(your username)\miniconda3 and select python.exe. Now you can just double-click on the script to run it.
Any comments, bug reports and suggestions are welcome. Happy writing!