According to a 2012 Pew Research Center report investigating how teens approach research, "94% of the teachers surveyed say their students are “very likely” to use Google or other online search engines in a typical research assignment." When conducting literature reviews or aggregating sources in this manner, a major pain-point is organizing information and keeping track of where it comes from. From interviews conducted amongst our peers, we've gathered that most people maintain a Word Document where they copy and paste pertinent information that they find from various sources as they browse the web. Our interviewees frequently cited annoyance with having to flip back and forth between their source and the document to copy and paste. We decided to build Scribe to streamline this information collection process.
Scribe is a Google Chrome extension that allows a user to copy and paste text of interest from any webpage into a Google Doc of their choosing. The Google Doc is automatically formatted so that any text a user chooses to extract from a source, is grouped together and indexed by the source's url. In essence, Scribe cuts out the steps of creating a Google Doc, switching between the Doc and the source multiple times to grab the text and url, and ultimately formatting the Doc.
Creating, editing, and formatting the Google Docs was done using Google App Scripts. Scribe itself was built using HTML and Javascript.
We are most excited about the impact Scribe can have on making student's lives easier while researching for a paper. In addition, our team had never built a Chrome Extension before so we are very excited to share our first one with you!
This current version of Scribe only collects the url of the webpage the text of interest is from. We've received a lot of user feedback that adding auto-citation would be a huge bonus.
Scribe is now on the Google Chrome Extension store! You can find it here