citations

October 30, 2023 By Karen Kenjosian

Streamlining Research: Scrible’s Journal Article Magic

Academic research and writing is constantly changing and evolving, making journal articles an essential part of the process. Whether you’re a student, educator, or researcher, the depth of knowledge offered by journal articles is incredibly valuable. Scrible recognizes this significance and has introduced innovative features to enhance the research experience.

Physical Journal Articles

Scrible has simplified the process of integrating physical journal articles into research. These credible sources can now seamlessly join your Scrible library.

By integrating physical journal articles into Scrible, you’re equipping yourself with a powerful tool for conducting comprehensive research. Whether crafting a research paper, preparing for a presentation, or simply expanding your knowledge, Scrible makes it easy to harness the wealth of information in physical journals.

Digital Journal Articles

The Scrible team is dedicated to improving your research experience, and this commitment extends to digital journal articles as well. To optimize the potential of your digital copies of journals, check out our step-by-step guide.

Collaborating and Sharing

Scrible isn’t just for solo research. It also allows you to collaborate with teammates and fellow researchers, making sharing articles, annotations, and notes easy. This collaborative feature streamlines group projects and facilitates sharing of research findings, making your research journey even more efficient and productive.

Citing Academic Journals

Citing academic journals in your research papers is a crucial step in the research process. Citing reputable sources offers several advantages:

Credibility: Peer-reviewed academic journals ensure the accuracy and veracity of information, lending credibility to your work when cited.

Depth of Knowledge: Journal articles offer expert analysis, research findings, and topic insights.

Supporting Claims: Citations from academic journals provide evidence to support arguments and claims, enhancing research paper persuasiveness.

Academic Integrity: Properly citing sources, such as journal articles, is crucial to upholding academic integrity, as it demonstrates respect for others’ work and helps to avoid plagiarism.

Scrible offers innovative features that allow researchers, students, and educators to seamlessly integrate physical and digital journal articles into their research process. These features enhance efficiency and ensure the integrity and quality of your work. By citing academic journals in your research papers, you tap into a wealth of knowledge and increase the credibility of your research.

October 23, 2023 By Karen Kenjosian

Group Assignments: Collaborate And Elevate Your Research

At Scrible, we believe that collaborative learning fosters more profound understanding, creative outcomes, and numerous additional benefits. That’s why we’re thrilled to spotlight one of our most exciting features: Group Assignments.

Elevate your research skills and streamline your workflow with Scrible’s robust and collaborative tools. With Scrible, you can collaborate with your team and seamlessly organize your research notes, citations, and sources. Say goodbye to the chaos of manual note-taking and hello to a streamlined and efficient research process. Whether you’re a student, researcher, or professional, Scrible’s powerful tools will transform your research game and help you achieve success.

The Power of Collaborative Learning
Recent studies shed light on the multifaceted advantages of collaborative learning:

Enhanced Academic Motivation: Collaborative learning methods have significantly boosted academic motivation among students (Loes, 2022)¹. When students work together, they become more invested in learning, leading to heightened enthusiasm and engagement.

Active collaborative learning significantly impacts student engagement: A recent study states (Qureshi et al., 2021) that active learning involves students participating in discussions, making presentations, and gaining real-world experiences. Studies show that students learn better when they actively think and engage in their learning. This kind of learning also makes students more involved in their classes, committed to their education, and less likely to drop out. It creates a competitive learning environment. Active collaborative learning is a motivating method that gets students actively involved in learning. It means students work together to achieve different levels of performance.²

Improved Academic Writing Skills: Incorporating online collaboration tools into learning has positively affected students’ academic writing skills (Li & Mak, 2022)³. The interactive nature of such tools allows for instant feedback and collective problem-solving, leading to refined writing techniques.

How Does It Work?

Creating Group Assignments: Teachers can easily create group assignments and select members for each group. This allows for structured collaboration while ensuring each student plays a role.

Shared Libraries: Every group assignment comes with a shared library. This hub allows students to add, annotate, and discuss sources collaboratively. It’s a dynamic space where the research process becomes interactive.

Shared Annotations & Notes: Group members can see each other’s annotations and notes in real time. This fosters immediate discussion, clarification, and integration of different viewpoints.

Individual Accountability: Even within group assignments, individual contributions are tracked. This ensures that every student actively participates and contributes to the group’s success.

The Benefits

Enhanced Critical Thinking: When students work together, they challenge each other’s ideas, leading to deeper understanding and better research outcomes.
Improved Communication Skills: Collaborating in a digital space requires clear communication. Students learn to express their ideas succinctly and effectively.
Responsibility & Accountability: With individual contributions being tracked, students learn the importance of responsibility in a group setting.

Get Started!

Group assignments are a transformative feature that can elevate students’ research and writing process. If you’re a teacher looking to enhance collaborative learning in your classroom, get started with Scrible’s group assignments today!

Join the revolution in collaborative learning. Dive into Scrible, and let’s make research and writing a collaborative adventure!

Loes, C. N. (2022). The Effect of Collaborative Learning on Academic Motivation. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 10. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.10.4 ↩︎
Muhammad Asif Qureshi, Asadullah Khaskheli, Jawaid Ahmed Qureshi,
Syed Ali Raza & Sara Qamar Yousufi (2021): Factors affecting students’ learning performance
through collaborative learning and engagement, Interactive Learning Environments, DOI:
10.1080/10494820.2021.1884886 ↩︎
Li, J., & Mak, L. (2022). The effects of using an online collaboration tool on college students’ learning of academic writing skills. System, 105, 102712. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102712 ↩︎

February 14, 2023 By Karen Kenjosian

Tip Tuesday | How to Edit a Citation

Happy Valentine’s Day! Are you loving our Tip Tuesday missives? It’s no secret we admire you! Let’s get to the heart of the matter with another tip to help you get the most out of Scrible! We would love to know what tips you want in the future! 🙂

Today’s Tip: How to Edit a Citation
When creating a bibliography, it’s essential to have the accurate citations. Scrible automagically generates citations for your sources. However, if an auto-generated citation is missing any required info, you can (and should) edit it to to update and correct it. Here’s how to do that…

Step 1: Go to My Library and…

Step 2: Click on the title of the source to open it.

Step 3: Select the Citation Sidebar to see the citation editor

Step 4: Note that missing elements of the citation glow red. In this example, the journal title is missing. Let’s fix that.

Step 5: Entering the publication name prompts additional fields to complete. Edit them as needed.

Step 6: At the bottom of the Citation Sidebar, your citation updates in real-time and is auto saved.

Happy Scribling!

Your Feedback Makes a Difference

Please let us know what kinds of tips you want to see!

November 2, 2016 By Scrible

Scrible Launches Cloud-Based PDF Viewer/Annotator with Real-Time Collaboration

You spoke and we listened! PDF annotation is one of our most requested features. Well, it’s here now, along with a new way of working with PDFs! We’re proud to announce the new Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator.

Wait. PDFs? Does anyone read PDFs anymore? It’s 2016. Isn’t everything on websites these days?

You’d think so. So much of the world’s knowledge has moved to webpages, but Phil Ydens, VP of Engineering at Adobe, reports 1.6 billion PDFs are on the Web and 73M new PDFs are saved to Google Drive/Gmail daily. Obviously, you’re not reading news in PDFs, but research studies, business reports and white papers, academic and scholarly articles and the like are all still published, shared and consumed in PDF… And that’s just the new stuff. There’s a treasure trove of legacy PDFs. Altogether, Phil estimates 2.5 trillion PDFs in the world. That’s with a t. Whoa.

OK, but a PDF app? Isn’t that retro? Haven’t there been a million PDF viewers since the 90s?

Yeah, but times have changed. We spend way more time in browsers and using cloud-based apps like Google Apps these days. Legacy PDF viewers were built for the Desktop Era. It’s time to go back to the future with a modern way to work with a legacy file format. Our new PDF Viewer/Annotator is browser-based, auto-saves your PDFs and annotations to the cloud, enables real-time collaboration, fits seamlessly into your Web browsing experience and integrates with Google Drive. Welcome to the future.

Enough with the prologue. Let’s show you the new hotness… Oh, but first… If you’re new to Scrible, sign up and add our Chrome Extension (strongly recommended) or Bookmarklet first.

PDF VIEWER

Opening a PDF in your Scrible Library now opens it in our new PDF Viewer/Annotator. That’s in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (Sorry IE/Edge users). Here’s an example, showing brilliant comments by Elon Tusk on a NASA paper about Mars missions:

Menu of Options/Tools

The menu of options/tools shown atop the PDF is magnified here:

Each option/tool should be self-evident. If not, hover over each one to display a tooltip that’ll clarify its purpose.

Sidebar

The right-most button toggles a Sidebar on/off with separate tabs for various useful tools/info about the PDF.

Thumbnails Tab in Sidebar Citations Tab in Sidebar

PDF ANNOTATION

You can annotate PDFs using different colored highlights and comments right in your browser. Awesomeness.

If you’re annotating a shared PDF, your highlights can overlap with others’ highlights without impacting them. So, highlight to your heart’s content. You won’t mess up anyone else’s work.

In PDF Land, comments replace the notes you see in our webpage annotation tools. Don’t worry… We’ll update the Web annotation approach in the future and restore balance to the Force. Comments appear in the Comments Bar and are anchored to text in the PDF so it’s clear what’s being discussed.

We’ll be bringing more annotation tools to PDFs. A few of the Web annotation features loved by our Pro users – like Underline and Legends – aren’t yet in PDF Land, but they’re coming. Hang tight.

AUTO-SAVE

PDFs and all annotations made to them are auto-saved to your Scrible Library. (Mic drop)

…(Um. Picking mic back up) When auto-saving is underway, you’ll see a yellow icon spinning next to the Highlight Button. Otherwise, you’ll see a green check mark there like you see above.

COMMENT REPLIES

In PDF Land, you can reply to someone else’s comment on a shared PDF. Know what that means? You can have discussions right in the margin of the PDF. You comment. Elon replies. You reply. He replies and shuts you down. Well, better luck next time.

REAL-TIME COLLABORATION

We built this Google Docs-style. What’s that mean? You know how multiple people can edit the same Google Doc at the same time? Same deal here. Elon and his team can see each other’s annotations on a shared PDFin real-time as they’re made. So, no waiting for Gwynne to send you her comments before you add yours and then send them to Tom. You can all just access, comment and reply whenever you’re free and everyone else can see your comments immediately. You’re welcome.

WEB BROWSING INTEGRATION

Let’s say you’re researching on the Web. You find a golden PDF and you’re viewing it in the browser. Just click our Chrome Extension or Bookmarklet* to load the PDF in the Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator. It’s autosaved and ready to annotate. In 1 click, the file is yours and ready to work with without leaving your Web browsing or online research flow. Nice.

GOOGLE DRIVE INTEGRATION

Right click on a PDF file in your Google Drive and select Open with > scrible to open the PDF in the Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator, which auto-saves the file to your Scrible Library and lets you to annotate it. Easy peasy.

To enable this, authorize us to connect the Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator to your Google Drive by clicking the Authorize Button next to Annotate PDFs from Google Drive under Settings > Connected Apps when you’re signed into your Scrible account.

This is all new! So, please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions or hit any problems! Thanks!

–The Scrible Team

* – Some folks might need to re-add our Bookmarklet for this to work. If that’s you, right click on the Scrible Toolbar Bookmarklet in your browser’s bookmarks bar, choose Delete and then re-add the Bookmarklet from our Tools Page.