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The Browser extension is one of our most popular and widely used tools on F1000Workspace , so I thought I’d use this post to write a bit about the benefits of using it. I hope it’s useful for beginners and pros alike – there may even be some new features more experienced users don’t know about! Let’s get started…

The Browser Extension (AKA the ‘Annotator’) is a really handy, time saving tool that performs two main functions:

1. Importing – saving articles from the web
2. Annotating – Highlighting important passages of PDFs and websites, and making notes that accompany your highlights

Importing

The first thing that you’ll want to do when you create your F1000Workspace account is to start collecting references. If you’re browsing sites like PubMed, Google Scholar, F1000Research or basically any journal site, you can use the extension to instantly save individual articles and articles from search results pages to your library.

To get started, just click the F icon in your browser, select a project to add the reference to and click ADD.

In most cases these articles have a unique identifier (either a DOI or PubMed ID) that we use to get the most complete metadata and create your reference in the F1000Workspace site. In the case of Open Access articles, we’ll also try to get the full text PDF and attach it to the reference, so in a couple of clicks you get the reference with full citation details and the PDF to go with it!

Another handy benefit is the extension will also detect any articles cited in the original reference that have a DOI or PMID. After you’ve imported an article, just click the Show cited articles button to select and add these instantly. The extension also works for almost any other website, blog page etc.

Screenshot of the window after an article has been added

Directly underneath the article title you’ll see 3 buttons:

• Clicking notes will bring up a list of highlights made on the article
• Tags: A feature we’ve added recently (due to multiple requests from our users) is the ability to add tags directly from the extension – just click the ‘tags’ button and you can add existing F1000Workspace tags or create new ones. Thanks to everyone who made this suggestion!
• Clicking F1000 will take you to the article entry in your F1000Workspace library

 Annotating

In the browser extension window, you’ll see it has three modes:

• Highlight Off mode will let you save articles, but you can’t make highlights with this mode.
• Highlight On mode is for auto highlighting – as soon as you select some text it will be highlighted and the article/webpage imported. This is perfect for speedy highlighting with minimal clicks, but you can’t make notes unless you edit the highlight by hovering your cursor over it and selecting the edit (pencil) icon.
• Highlight + Notes mode will allow for a note to be made along with the highlight, ideal for more detailed research. Your notes are fully searchable in the F1000Workspace site so you can get back to them quickly and easily.

To start annotating, just select the desired text and click the F icon that pops up – you can highlight in a variety of different colours:

Pro tip: When searching and adding references in Google Scholar, you can get better quality citation data by clicking the cite icon (“) and choosing the F1000Workspace option.

Once you’ve added some highlights and notes, you can find them again quickly by clicking the ‘notes’ section in the extension window – you’ll get a list of highlights and notes which you can click to take you directly to the corresponding section in your article.

That’s all for the browser extension, thanks for reading and I hope you’ve found it useful. Don’t forget that if you’d like to make a suggestion, or if you need help at any time you can click the chat icon in the F1000Workspace site and send us a message – we love feedback!