Hey HN, I'm an PhD student who got tired of spending full weekends manually reformatting citations in Word documents (e.g., translating a 30-page manuscript between APA 7, Harvard, and Vancouver just to submit to different journals).

Existing reference managers like Mendeley or EndNote are great for library management, but they strictly rely on their own proprietary add-ons and field codes to format a paper. If your document contains plain text citations (which happens constantly when collaborating with co-authors or inheriting drafts), those tools completely fail to reformat the document, forcing you to rewrite everything manually.

I built ScholarRef as a lightweight Python utility (using python-docx and CustomTkinter for the GUI). Instead of basic string-matching over the text, it unpacks the .docx XML, structurally maps the plain-text in-body citations to the bibliography list, verifies their integrity, and actively rewrites them into the new academic format in under a second—leaving all your tables, headings, and free-text completely untouched.

It's completely free, offline, and provides a polished interface for any academic, student, or researcher to use. I hope this helps!