Permissions for the Google Docs plugin

For Paperpile’s Google Docs integration, our systems process your document’s contents on a secure server to manage citations and bibliographies. In order to use this integration, you must grant Paperpile permission to access documents in your Google Account.

This page describes those permissions, why they are needed, and the alternative per-file permission that is available when the recommended permissions won’t work.

Recommended permissions flow

The recommended permissions flow is a one-time step required to grant Paperpile access to your Google Docs documents.

When you first format a citation or bibliography in Google Docs, Paperpile will show a dialog asking you to grant permission:

When you select Allow, a new window will open with a Google Account sign-in flow. Sign in to the Google Account you use for Paperpile and continue.

Once signed in, you will see a request to grant Paperpile access to Google Docs documents in your account:

After confirming this permission, the window will close and Paperpile will continue formatting your document.

Why does Paperpile require these permissions?

Paperpile’s servers must be able to read and modify your Google Docs documents via Google’s APIs in order to manage citations and bibliographies.

Unfortunately, Google does not provide a permission that will work across all your documents and is tightly-scoped to only what Paperpile needs for this purpose. The only suitable permission, known as the documents permission, includes extraneous permissions such as creating, deleting, and changing sharing settings on your documents. Although the permission grant is broad, Paperpile’s servers will never delete any of your Google Docs documents or modify their sharing settings. The only actions performed by our servers are to read and update your document’s contents in order to format citations and bibliographies.

This recommended permissions flow is identical to that used by Zotero and other reference managers.

Alternative: per-file permissions

If you are part of a Google Workspace organization that applies strict security settings, you may not be able to follow the recommended permissions flow. If this is the case, you can still use the Google Docs integration by granting Paperpile access to each individual Google Docs document you are working on.

This per-file permission is less convenient, since you need to redo the flow for each subsequent file. But its grants a narrower scope of permissions, which may be preferable for institutional accounts or security-minded users.

To start this flow, select the “Allow for this document only” option when the Paperpile permissions tooltip appears:

When you continue, you will be asked to sign in to the Google Account you use with Paperpile. After signing in, you will then see a Google Docs file selection dialog:

Select the document you are currently working on and choose Continue. Paperpile should now be able to format citations in your document.

Troubleshooting

See Troubleshooting: Google Docs for recommended troubleshooting steps when working with the Google Docs integration.