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!