Almost every source you cite, you find in a browser. A paper on arXiv, an article in a journal, a report linked from a syllabus, a talk on YouTube, a book page you want to come back to. And almost every time, getting it into your reference manager means the same small tax: copy the URL, switch to the app, paste, wait, fix the metadata it got wrong.
That tax is tiny. It's also the reason half the sources you meant to save never make it in. Friction at the moment of intent is where libraries go to die.
So we moved Folio to where the research actually happens. Save to Folio is a browser extension, and it's live now on the Chrome Web Store.
One click, from anywhere
Click the toolbar icon on a page and Folio shows you what it found — title, authors, year, the right source type — and saves it with one more click. No copy-paste, no tab switch, no metadata cleanup.
It works on more than papers. It reads the same structured data that publishers, news sites, and video platforms already put on their pages, so it recognises journal articles and preprints, but also news stories, books, government reports, YouTube videos, and blog posts — and files each as the right type. If a page has a DOI anywhere on it, even buried in a reading list, Folio catches it and fills in the details from CrossRef.
Three ways to save, depending on how you work:
- Click the icon for the page you're on.
- Right-click any link — "Save to Folio" pulls in that link's target without you even opening it. Handy for working through a bibliography or a Twitter thread.
- A keyboard shortcut (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F) to save silently and keep reading.
And on Google Scholar, every result grows a little + Folio button, so you can capture three papers out of a search of ten without leaving the results.
Catch the citations AI made up
We've written before about why chatbots fabricate references: they don't look anything up, they predict what a citation should look like. The authors are real, the journal is real, the paper never existed. It's not a bug that gets patched — it's how the models work.
So the extension has a Verify tab. Paste any text — a paragraph from ChatGPT or Gemini, a draft, a reference list someone sent you — and Folio pulls out every citation and checks each one against CrossRef, the database behind scholarly DOIs. You get a verdict per citation: real, worth a closer look, or not found. The AI only helps read the text into citations; whether each one is real is decided by CrossRef, not by a model. So the checker itself can't hallucinate.
It's the fastest way I know to sanity-check a reference list before it embarrasses you.
Ask a paper a question before you commit to it
The last tab is Ask. Open a paper, ask "what's the sample size?" or "what do the authors say the limitations are?", and Folio answers using only the text on the page. If the answer isn't there, it says so instead of guessing. It's for triage — deciding whether a paper is worth your afternoon before you save it, let alone read it.
How to get it
Install it from the Chrome Web Store, sign in to Folio once in any tab, and that's it — the extension picks up your session, there's no second login. Everything you save syncs straight to your library.
Edge and Firefox are on the way. If you've been meaning to get your reading into one place, this is the version of Folio that finally makes it effortless — pin it to your toolbar and see how much more ends up in your library by the end of the week.