Citation organizes your papers, generates flawless citations in 9,000+ styles, and keeps your reading notes in one quiet, scholarly place — built for academics who value rigor over noise.
Start reading freelyEvery reference you collect is a thread in a larger conversation. Citation treats your library as a living manuscript — annotated, cross-referenced, and preserved with the precision a published work deserves.
Import PDFs, capture metadata from DOI or arXiv, and build a searchable library that mirrors the way you actually think about your field — by topic, by author, by argument.
From APA 7th to Chicago Notes-Bibliography to journal-specific house styles. Citation formats every reference to the exact punctuation required by the publication manual.
Highlight, annotate, and tag passages within your PDFs. Your notes stay linked to the source — never orphaned in a separate document you will never reopen.
Create private groups for your lab, your seminar, or your co-authors. Share libraries, exchange annotations, and build a collective bibliography without version conflicts.
Citation maps citation networks across your library — showing which papers cite which, where the consensus lies, and where the disagreements begin.
Export to BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON, or a formatted bibliography in any style. Paste directly into LaTeX, Word, or Google Docs — no reformatting, no manual cleanup.
Drop a PDF into Citation, or paste a DOI, arXiv ID, or URL. Metadata — authors, title, journal, volume, pages, date — is extracted automatically and verified against Crossref and PubMed.
Open the PDF in the built-in reader. Highlight passages, write margin notes, and tag arguments with your own taxonomy. Every annotation is searchable and linked back to its exact location in the source.
Group papers into collections that reflect your thinking — not just by topic, but by the claim they support or the debate they enter. Citation remembers which papers agree, which dissent, and which complicate.
Insert citations into your manuscript using the Citation plugin for Word, LaTeX, or Google Docs. Switch between 9,000+ styles with a single command. The bibliography rebuilds itself — every time, correctly.
"I have moved through four reference managers in fifteen years of research. Citation is the first one that treats my library as a body of thought rather than a list of files. The annotation linking alone saved my last book manuscript."
"The citation network mapping changed how I teach graduate methods. My students can now see the topology of a debate before they read a single paper. It is pedagogy at the level of the field itself."
"I write in LaTeX and my co-authors write in Word. Citation handles both without complaint — the same library, the same metadata, correct styles on both ends. The friction of collaborative writing has simply dissolved."
"What I appreciate most is the restraint. No gamification, no dashboards, no notifications shouting for attention. It is a tool that respects the quiet concentration that scholarship actually requires."