Ways to add a source
Choose Add source in your library (or + Add in the editor's Sources panel). The options are grouped by how you start:
- Discover: Search the literature runs one search across Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex and CrossRef, and adds what you pick.
- Look up:
- URL: paste any webpage, journal article, preprint, or online resource. Folio reads the page and extracts whatever metadata it can find.
- DOI: paste a DOI (e.g.
10.1000/xyz123) for journal articles. This gives the most reliable metadata because it comes straight from CrossRef. - ISBN: paste a 10- or 13-digit ISBN for books. Folio looks it up in OpenLibrary and Google Books.
- arXiv, PubMed and OpenAlex: look a paper up by its identifier in each catalog.
- Import:
- PDF Upload: one paper, plus the references in its reference list if you want them.
- Google Drive or OneDrive: choose one PDF from your cloud drive. Only the file you choose is shared with Folio, and your access token is not stored. If the card says the import isn't set up yet, download the file and use PDF Upload.
- Bulk PDFs: a whole folder at once. See Bringing your research into Folio.
- BibTeX / RIS: a reference file (.bib, .ris, CSL-JSON, MODS or EndNote XML). See Importing and exporting your library.
- Paste References: paste a messy reference list and Folio's AI parses it into records.
- Other: Manual Entry to type the details yourself, Zotero to import your Zotero library, and Mendeley (through a BibTeX or RIS export).
What happens when you add a source
Metadata is extracted automatically: title, authors, year, journal or publisher, and abstract (when available). When the source has a DOI, Folio fills any empty volume, issue, pages and journal fields from its CrossRef record, without overwriting what you or the source already supplied. The text is cleaned of stray markup, and the source is immediately searchable in your library by title, author, year, or any keyword in the abstract. Citations are formatted from it on demand, in whichever style your document uses.
Duplicates
Folio checks your library before it saves anything. If the paper is already there (the same DOI, or the same title when the DOIs, years and first authors don't say otherwise), nothing is added and Folio tells you: Already in your library, with a Show it link. Sources in your Trash don't count, so adding a paper you trashed creates a fresh copy.
Editing source metadata
Automatic extraction isn't always perfect, especially for PDFs or pages with unusual formatting. In the editor's Sources panel, Edit on a source lets you correct its title, authors and year. Changes apply to every citation of that source across all your documents.
Supported citation formats
Folio supports seven citation styles: APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18, Chicago 18 (notes), IEEE, Harvard, and Vancouver. You can switch formats at any time and all citations update instantly, with no manual reformatting.
Tips
- DOI lookup gives the most reliable metadata. If you have the DOI, use it.
- For PDFs, text extraction works best on text-based documents. Bulk PDFs reads scanned PDFs of up to 25 pages with OCR and marks them OCR'd; a single scanned PDF uploaded on its own may come in with incomplete metadata.