We are in an era where accessing a knowledge base or accessing an archived research document is not too far off. Whether it’s school assignments, college projects, database access, or business proposal stylistics, we all need to keep some kind of detailed sheets that can make our work easier and faster. As you research the web, you may feel that accessing a wealth of information is a boon of the digital age, but again organizing the information scattered all over the web is a difficult challenge.
When conducting research with many citations, bookmarking web pages may not be helpful in keeping track of every source of information. Citable, a Chrome extension, is featured to tackle all database management and research challenges. The tool is very useful when conducting detailed research, as it allows you to save a website link, along with your own description, in a Google spreadsheet document.
In this article, you will learn how to install and start using Citable to improve your research results and keep track of each of the web pages you have referenced:
Steps to install and use Citable
1. Go to the Chrome extensions page, search for “Citable” in the search box and click the “Install” button to install the extension.
2. When the installation process has completed successfully, you will see a quotation mark icon in the upper right corner of the browser.
3. Now, find the web page you want to save in the current tab and then click on the icon.
4. When accessing this tool for the first time, a Google registration window should request permission / access to your Google Drive account. Since the investigated links will be stored in the Google spreadsheet document, click the ‘Allow’ button to authorize the extension.
5. Upon successful sign-up to your Google account, you will be presented with a drop-down notepad each time you click on the quote icon.
6. Typically, the notepad will already display the current web page information such as the article title, author name, and URL, but if it doesn’t appear, you can add it manually. In addition, you can also add a tag and a short summary to make your Google spreadsheet more reliable and easier to track the details of the web page.
7. When done, click on the ‘Create Document’ option from the drop-down list at the bottom, give your document a name and click the ‘Save’ button. The new spreadsheet file will be saved in the Citable folder, located on the main page of your Google Drive account.
8. Once the spreadsheet is saved, a link to view the document will be provided and clicking on it will open the document in Google Drive, in a new tab.
9. The spreadsheet will follow a simple six-column layout, including title, URL, date, author, summary, and tag fields for saved web pages.
10. Now you can repeat the same process for each web page that you want to add to this list and add as a source.
Google Spreadsheet can be really useful while researching on different topics, as you can create multiple documents to manage the sources separately. Edits made to these spreadsheets are applied in real time, so you can see them shortly after adding them to the spreadsheet. Apart from this, this extension can also be managed by keyboard shortcuts. To learn the same, right click on the quote icon and go to the ‘Options’ menu, there you can see the four hotkeys to navigate and use the extension. Offered as a perfect solution for intensive research work that includes numerous citations from different sources, Citable makes the data highly organized by placing it in a beautiful spreadsheet.