Research Quote Capture — Help
Two parts: a usage guide for the four exports (BibTeX, CSV, JSON, Markdown) and a troubleshooting guide for the most common issues. If neither covers your case, jump to the bottom — the support template gets you a fix in under a day in most cases.
Using your exports
Capture, browse, and search are free forever. Export to BibTeX, CSV, JSON, and Markdown is part of Pro — and the most important part, because it's where the captured library actually meets your manuscript. Here's what each format unlocks.
Each quote becomes a @article (with DOI) or @misc (URL-only) entry. The selection text rides in the note field. Citation keys follow lastnameYearFirstWord (e.g. patel2024structural).
Zotero / Mendeley: File → Import → choose the .bib. Each quote shows up as a reference; the selection appears in the Notes / Extra column.
LaTeX manuscript: drop into your .bib and cite by key —
\bibliography{research-quote-capture-2026-05-07}
% in body:
\cite{patel2024structural}Caveat: if you captured 3 quotes from the same paper, BibTeX will have 3 entries with the same DOI but distinct keys (patel2024structural, patel2024structural2, …). Zotero dedupes by DOI on import; if your tool doesn't, merge manually.
Eleven columns: id, text, url, title, capturedAt, doi, openAlexId, authors, year, journal, publicationDate. RFC 4180; UTF-8 (no BOM — opens cleanly in Excel 2016+).
Excel / Sheets: open the file directly. Filter by journal for "all my Nature quotes." Pivot on authors for "who am I citing most?" Sort by capturedAt for "what did I read last week?"
pandas:
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('research-quote-capture-2026-05-07.csv')
nature_2024 = df[(df['year']==2024) & df['journal'].str.contains('Nature', na=False)]R: read.csv(), then standard tidyverse / base-R workflows.
The full Quote object array. Field order is deterministic. This is the format to keep around for safekeeping.
Backup: save the file to Dropbox / Google Drive / iCloud. If your IndexedDB ever clears (browser data wipe, machine swap, profile corruption), this is your only recovery.
Restore on a new machine: open the popup, click "Import from JSON," choose the file. Existing quotes are kept; new ones are added (skip-on-id-collision).
jq one-liners:
# Quotes per journal
jq 'group_by(.citation.journal) | map({journal: .[0].citation.journal, count: length})' export.json
# Just text + URL for a writing pipeline
jq '.[] | {text, url}' export.jsonEach quote is a > blockquote with the source URL, a clickable DOI link, and (when present) the citation. Quotes separated by ---.
Obsidian / Logseq: create a new note, paste the file content. Each quote becomes a backlinked block; [[wikilink]] them into your thesis-chapter notes. DOI links are clickable in preview.
Notion: paste into a Notion page. (For 100+ quotes, paste in chunks — Notion's import is paragraph-by-paragraph for large blocks.)
Drafting workflow (the most common Pro use): open the .md alongside your manuscript draft. Read your captured quotes; pick which to use; copy excerpts into the draft with attribution; use BibTeX export for the actual reference list. Markdown is where you think with your library; BibTeX is how you publish from it.
Which format should I use?
| If you write in… | Use this format | For… |
|---|---|---|
| LaTeX / Overleaf | BibTeX | Drop straight into .bib; cite by key |
| Word / Google Docs (humanities) | Markdown + BibTeX | Markdown for thinking/drafting; BibTeX for the final reference list |
| Obsidian / Logseq / Notion | Markdown | Each quote becomes a backlinked block |
| Excel / Google Sheets | CSV | Audit reading, run systematic-review screening |
| Python / R notebooks | CSV or JSON | Programmatic analysis |
| Just want a backup | JSON | Lossless, restorable via the popup's Import panel |
? button next to "Export" inside the extension popup for the recipes side-by-side with the export buttons.
The keyboard shortcut isn't doing anything when I press Ctrl+Shift+Q
This is the most common report and it's almost always one of three causes.
Cause A: Chrome assigned a different shortcut. Chrome doesn't always honor an extension's preferred shortcut, especially if another extension installed earlier claimed Ctrl+Shift+Q. Open a new tab and go to chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Find the row for Research Quote Capture. The "Activate the extension" field should read Ctrl+Shift+Q on Windows/Linux or ⌘+Shift+Q on Mac. If it's blank or different, click the pencil icon and re-enter the shortcut.
Cause B: Another extension or the OS is intercepting the keystroke. On Mac, ⌘+Shift+Q is the system "Log Out" shortcut in some configurations and macOS will swallow it before Chrome sees it. On Windows, some screenshot or clipboard utilities (ShareX, Greenshot) bind to the same combination. Reassign the extension shortcut to something the OS doesn't claim — Ctrl+Shift+J, Ctrl+Shift+E, and Alt+Shift+Q are all good candidates.
Cause C: You're on a page where extensions can't run. The shortcut won't fire on chrome:// pages, the Chrome Web Store itself, or PDF files in the built-in viewer. Switch to a regular web page (any article URL) and try again.
chrome://extensions/shortcuts, confirm the shortcut for Research Quote Capture is set, and reassign to a non-conflicting combination (Ctrl+Shift+J is safe on every platform). Then go to a regular web page, select some text, and press the shortcut. You should see a small toast at the bottom-right confirming "Quote captured."Capture saved a quote but didn't pull citation metadata. Why?
Citation metadata enrichment is a Pro feature, and even on Pro it only runs when the extension can detect a valid DOI on the page. Three reasons it might not.
The page has no DOI. Blog posts, news articles, and most preprint-server landing pages don't include a DOI. The quote saves with text + URL + title + timestamp, which is the right behavior for non-academic sources. The library will show "No citation" instead of authors and year.
The page has a DOI, but it's hidden in a place we don't look. We check, in order: <meta name="citation_doi">, <meta name="dc.identifier">, JSON-LD ScholarlyArticle, the URL path, and the visible page text. If a publisher hides the DOI inside a JavaScript-rendered popup or a non-standard meta tag, we miss it. Open the quote in your library and click "Edit DOI" to add it manually; the next library load will fetch the citation from OpenAlex.
OpenAlex was unavailable when the quote was captured. If our 3-second request to OpenAlex timed out or returned an error, we save the quote with the raw DOI and a "Retry enrichment" button. Click it; usually the second attempt succeeds.
Why isn't capture working on this PDF?
Research Quote Capture v1.0 doesn't capture from Chrome's built-in PDF viewer. The built-in viewer's selection API doesn't expose selections to extensions in a stable way across the variants of PDF that publishers ship; the workarounds we evaluated would have either degraded reliability across non-PDF pages or required us to bundle a custom PDF viewer that triples the extension's size.
If the shortcut fires on a PDF, you'll see the message: "PDF capture isn't supported yet. Copy the text and use the 'Paste quote' option in the popup."
For now, the workflow we recommend: select the passage in the PDF, copy it (Ctrl+C), and either keep it in your manuscript draft or wait for v1.0.1, which adds a "Paste quote" button to the popup so you can paste the text plus the PDF's URL into the library manually. PDF capture as a first-class feature is on the v1.2 roadmap.
Still stuck?
Email support@gradsummit.com and include both of these:
- The URL of the page where the issue happened (or a screenshot of it if it's behind a paywall).
- The exact text of the toast or error message you saw, or "no toast at all" if the shortcut did nothing.
With those two things, we can usually reply with a fix or workaround within 24 hours. We're a one-person operation; please don't include sensitive information (signed-in account screenshots, personal documents).