Automate a bibliography and save time for all your presentations

Every student has been there: every presentation, dissertation or assignment requires extensive research and an exhaustive bibliography. A tedious task that makes us procrastinate... (#beentheredonethat)
Whether it's for personal reading, a presentation to be prepared or a study to be published, we always end up with a billion tabs open, a slow computer and embarrassing screen sharing during video!

Starting point: the limits of old-style source collection

For my quarterly newsletter, I'm always on the lookout for nuggets to share on digital and tech news. I therefore collect many articles that I risk losing track of.

In order not to miss anything, I have created a Notion page in which I paste all my sources for the next issue.
This is already a good first step, as I am relieving my browser of a lot of reading to catch up on later. However, it also requires me to copy the title of the article so that I know quickly what it is about when I open the link for the choice of topics to share.

In addition, some of the articles are closely related to the same subject and I am trying to group them into toggles to find my way around.

Which Nocode stack to automate source collection?

You will have understood my brief. I would like :

• save links without keeping tabs open or overloading my favorites bar
• easily find all my sources in one place
• know at a glance the content of the link (title, date, link, author, etc.)
• and all this in an automated way, of course!

Fortunately, others have asked themselves the same questions and have already planned an automation template on Zapier, a Nocode platform that allows applications to be connected to automate tasks.

Among the many use cases that optimise note-taking, I'm looking at this one that fits my brief perfectly: connecting the Pocket app to Zapier.

Prerequisite: download Pocket and create a Drive folder

I quickly downloaded Pocket, available on Android and iOS, as well as its Chrome extension, as this is my most frequent use case.

I create a Google Drive folder that I call "Newsletter" and a file "NSL #5" to prepare the next publication.

Preliminary #1: feeding your list on Pocket

I connect my newly created Pocket account and feed it with a first article that I label "newsletter". 

I open another article in Chrome and I also add it to my Pocket list (thanks to the extension) and give it the "newsletter" label.

This is crucial! You must label your backups so that Zapier recognises them.

So I did a test with 2 contents but one would have been enough. There are many ways to add content to your list (also on mobile) but I chose my most common use case on desktop.

Preliminary #2: being ready on Google Drive

The setup has been done on the source side, now we have to prepare their destination!

We create a Drive folder containing a file that will receive the links of the articles that we save in Pocket.

Step 1: Open Zapier and connect to your Pocket and Google Drive accounts

As I work in a world at the cutting edge of Tech, surrounded by Nocode Experts, I of course already have a Zapier account 🕶️

• The connection to Pocket works like clockwork and my content is immediately identified! ✅ (#petitevictoire)
• I am automatically redirected to the next step: connect Drive, very simple ✅
• Since Zapier is super smart 💡 (and I cheerfully gave permission to go digging in my Drive #bigdata), it/he/she automatically finds my folders ("Folder") and a search bar allows me to select the right one ("Newsletter") and connect it to the destination file ("Docuement Name", "NSL #5) ✅

Step 2: Customisation

This is where it gets really interesting! Remember my manual handling mentioned at the beginning... Here, I choose exactly how my source is listed. I choose to display: a custom text + the title of the article + its link
Depending on your use case, you can also select the date of the content, its author etc.

Step 3: Test and validate

Nothing more to say, I did my job well in the previous steps so the test worked, I activated my "Zap" and everything works!

How long did it take me?

It's time for a reckoning!

• It took me a good 15 minutes to install Pocket (app, extension) (and I must admit I watched a tutorial extract to understand the interface).
• 5 min of configuration on Pocket
• 10 min in total to be guided by the hand on Zapier and have a working Zap

All in all, it took me half an hour, I have set up a process that will save me a lot of time.

And for the unquantifiable, there is the pride of having automated a task that too many of us still do manually and the opportunity to impress a few people around me.

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The calculation is quickly done! Your turn 👉