By "grabbing references" I meant queries of the type "add paper [bla] to the bibliography" -- that seems useful to me!

Focusing in on "grabbing references", it's as easy as drag-and-drop if you use Zotero. It can copy/paste references in BibTeX format. You can even customize it through the BetterBibTeX extension.

If you're not a Zotero user, I can't recommend it enough.