Because the ACI Scholarly Blog Index was designed to meet the needs of academic researchers, one of the most popular tools for students and faculty using ACI is the export tool. The export tool allows users to save blog posts found in ACI to commonly-used citation and reference managers so that faculty and students can manage their content within their preferred platform. While ACI has export options for several platforms – including Mendeley, Zotero, EndNote, Dropbox, and even Google Drive – there is also the option to export a scholarly blog article to the RIS format, a generic format that allows researchers to migrate citation and reference data across platforms. One of the most commonly-used citation and reference management platforms in colleges and universities is RefWorks, and ACI’s RIS format option allows RefWorks users to import ACI posts into RefWorks where they can organize and manage their collections of scholarly blog content.
For those of you unfamiliar with RefWorks, it is a bibliographic management platform by ProQuest that allows you to save references from databases, create bibliographies, and manage your citation and reference collections. While it isn’t a free platform, many university libraries subscribe to RefWorks, providing access for all students, faculty, and staff at the subscribing institutions. Available in both a legacy version and a new version introduced in early 2016, RefWorks offers various options of organizing and managing scholarly blog content exported from the ACI Scholarly Blog Index.
In this blog post, we’ll show you two examples of how you can use RefWorks to save and manage scholarly posts found in ACI. The steps in this post, and the affiliated screenshots, are based on the legacy version of RefWorks (which many universities are still using), so researchers using the new version of RefWorks will see interface and feature differences. For example, “folders” in the legacy version are “collections” in the new version. And there are some really cool features in the new version; for example, after downloading a PDF within ACI, you can then drag the PDF into RefWorks, and it will attempt to extract the metadata attached to that scholarly blog article. However, those using either version of RefWorks should still find these steps useful. Just click on any thumbnail to view a larger version of that image in a new tab or window.
Export into RefWorks using the ACI Export Tool
Every scholarly blog post has its own webpage in the ACI Scholarly Blog Index, and you’ll notice a Cite tool and an Export tool in the lower-left corner of a scholarly blog post page. To export a scholarly blog post into a format for RefWorks exporting, first click on Export in that lower-left corner. This will open a new dialog in the center of your screen.
You’ll see several export options shown in the resulting dialog, including options for exporting to Mendeley, saving the post as a PDF document, exporting to Dropbox or Google Drive, and more. To export to RefWorks, click on the Download RIS File option in the lower-left corner of the ACI export options box. When you click on the Download RIS File option from the ACI export selections, that file will download to the default location for downloaded files for your computer.
On your RefWorks webpage, click on References in the upper-left corner of the RefWorks menu toolbar, and then click on Import. On the resulting dialog, you’ll see that the first two items are “Import Filter/Data Source” and “Database”. For each of these two items, select RIS format from the drop-down menu. Next, upload the file downloaded from ACI by clicking on Choose File for the Select Text File option. (You may also be able to drag your downloaded file onto the Choose File button; I was easily able to do this in my Chrome browser.)
At this point, you can click on Import in the lower-right corner of the dialog to begin exporting your scholarly blog post into RefWorks. This will place the reference into your general account without attaching it to an existing folder. However, if you have created folders to organize your collection, you can select that folder – or subfolder – using the Import Into Folder option before clicking on Import. For example, I have a primary RefWorks folder called Scholarly Blogs, but I also have 3 subfolders that I use to organize my scholarly blog references by topic and project. I can choose either the primary Scholarly Blogs folder or one of these 3 subfolders, and RefWorks will import the ACI article data into that specific collection. In this example, I’ll select my general Scholarly Blogs folder and then click the Import button. When the import is complete, you can click on “View last imported folder”, or just click the X to close the import dialog. In this case, I’ll click on “View last imported folder” so that I can view the item just added.
My RefWorks page is now displaying the scholarly blog post I just imported from ACI. This basic view includes the author, publication title, blog post title, and the year the post was published. In addition, notice that the author name is hyperlinked; if I happen to add more scholarly posts from this author, I will be able to use the author hyperlink to view all posts by that author across my RefWorks collections. While there are many tools I can use within RefWorks at this point, we’ll view the full metadata for this entry by clicking the View icon on the right side of the screen, indicated in the screenshot with an arrow.
As shown in this screenshot, the full view for the scholarly blog article we exported from ACI includes the author, publication title, and post title as shown in the basic entry view, as well as additional information only available through the full item view, such as the blog post abstract as available in the ACI collection. In addition, the full view also includes a direct link to that scholarly blog post page within the ACI Scholarly Blog Index.
Export into RefWorks using the RefWorks Browser Bookmarklet
RefWorks offers a bookmarklet tool that allows you to extract information, where available, from a webpage you’re currently visiting, and this bookmarklet works well with scholarly blog posts in ACI. The RefWorks website does state that the bookmarklet is to be used in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers; however, I added the bookmarklet to Chrome (my preferred browser), and it works just great in Chrome, too.
You can access the bookmarklet when logged into the RefWorks website. In the RefWorks menu toolbar, click on Tools, and then on RefGrab-It. This will open a small dialog, where you’ll see a RefGrab-It link on the right. (In the screenshot, this is circled in orange.) Now just click on that link without releasing, and simply drag that link onto your browser’s bookmark bar, as shown by the arrow in the screenshot. The RefGrab-It bookmark that now appears in your browser’s bookmark bar is what you’ll click on when you want to export information from your current webpage into your RefWorks account.
Now, when you’re on any scholarly blog post page in the ACI Scholarly Blog Index, you can easily import the information from that ACI post into your RefWorks collection by clicking the RefGrab-It bookmark on your browser’s bookmarks bar. Doing this will display a small dialog showing you the post information. Simply check the box next to the post and click the Import to RefWorks button, and the ACI post information will be added to your personal RefWorks collection.
Visit ACI at scholar.aci.info, or through your university’s custom ACI portal, and explore the export and organization options available – including the RefWorks platform – in the ACI Scholarly Blog Index.