Help:Citation tools
Appearance
![]() | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
The following tools can help you assemble a citation from limited information, with limited effort, although you should check their output for accuracy. These are tools with a variety of interfaces that provide a complete formatted reference based on a few initial details.
Tools
Editor tools |
---|
Editing aids |
Citation tools |
Things to review |
Customisation |
- Biomedical citation maker by User:Badgettrg. Converts a PubMed ID (PMID), DOI, PMCID, NCT to {{cite journal}} or simple wikiformatting for all journals indexed by PubMed. Bookmarklet is available. Adds links to ACP Journal Club and Evidence-Based Medicine comments if present.
- Citation Hunt: A tool for browsing snippets of Wikipedia articles that lack citations.
- Citer: Converts a URL, DOI, ISBN, PMID, PMCID, OCLC, or Google Books URL into a citation and shortened footnote. It also can generate citations for certain major news websites (e.g., The New York Times) and the Wayback Machine.
- Citoid: A tool built into both Visual Editor and source editor that attempts to build a full citation based on a URL. See user guide.
- Diberri Template builder: Converts URL, DrugBank ID, HGNC ID, PubMed ID, PubMed Central ID or PubChem ID to full citation.
- MakeRef: A form for creating various
{{cite xxx}}
templates. - OABOT, a tool that finds open-access links for citations
- reFill: Uses Citoid to replace all bare URLs on a Wikipedia page with filled {{cite web}} templates.
- RefScript: A bookmarklet that generates references with a single click. Works with a few news websites (BBC, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Canada, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Times of India, Financial Times, The Economist, Business Week, Ars Technica, TG Daily) and it can learn any other newspaper or website.
- Web2Cit: An automatic citation generator for web sources, meant to complement citation results by Citoid for which no valid translators exist. Web2Cit translators are community controlled. It runs its own server on toolforge.
- WebRef: A bookmarklet automating the filling of the {{cite web}} template.
- Wikipedia AutoReferencer, Microsoft word tool to convert embedded links to wikitext
- Wikipedia-References-Creator: A Firefox addon for creation of references (output changeable).
Templates
- BibDesk Export Template – An export template for formatting Wikipedia citation templates in BibDesk, which is a free open-source BibTeX-based reference management software application for macOS
- Citation Bot (more info) – Partial citations must either contain a DOI, PMID, PMC, ISBN, S2CID or enough fields to be uniquely found; the bot will also fix formatting errors
- Cite4Wiki for Mozilla Firefox 3.5+ – Allows you to create various templates including {{cite web}} and {{cite news}}; get the current version or an old version[dead link]
- CiteCompletion for AutoWikiBrowser – A custom module for AWB to complete citations of common English-language news sites
- citemark (JavaScript) – A bookmarklet to help create {{cite web}} templates; see the developer's page for details
- Find sources – provides links to customized searches for reliable sources in news newspapers books scholar JSTOR free images and the like. Points to a variety of templates for use in talk pages, on the AfD page etc., and for a variety of types of articles and situations.
- References segregator (JavaScript) – Shows references in a separate edit window for easy editing; can also convert references to list-defined references format
- refToolbar (JavaScript) – Allows you to format a reference during editing when you already have all the data
- Scopus search add-on – Find a reference on Scopus, then with one click it's formatted ready for use in an article
- SnipManager (JavaScript) – Adds a Ribbon menu above the edit form with templates (including citations) and the ability to preview citations
- toollabs:refill – Checks an article for working (non-404) references, corrects titles, adds citation templates, and performs other miscellaneous fixes
- User:CitationTool – Semi-bot for finding citation errors and fixing them
- Zotero (cross-platform) – Allows you to find articles and easily paste their citations into Wikipedia as citation templates, using (on Windows) Ctrl-Alt-C or right-clicking the article and selecting "Export Selected Item..." then "Wikipedia Citation Templates"; see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero
Citation tools
Reference markup and citation templates may be inserted manually or by use of tools:
- Citation expander automatically adds missing data to citations using citation templates, and makes corrections to their formatting
- ProveIt provides a graphical interface for editing, adding, and citing references. It may be enabled per the documentation
- RefToolbar is part of the editing tool bar
- SnipManager adds a ribbon interface to add citations
- reFill
- wikEd
User scripts
- Folded references collapses the references of a page
- Footnote popups Displays a small popup box of a footnote when you hover the cursor above a footnote link
- HarvErrors shows errors when using Harvard templates
- ListrefErrors shows errors when using {{listref}}
- PleaseStand/References segregator places references into a separate edit box
- Reference exporter
- Reference Organizer presents all references in graphical user interface, where you can choose whether the references should be defined in the body of article or in the reference list template(s) (list-defined format). You can also sort the references in various ways (and optionally keep the sort order), and rename the references.
- RefTooltip sets the tooltip for references to the text of the reference.
- ReviewSourceCheck (different versions for different preferences) flags 16 types of errors in the references and/or notes, when using Harv templates.
- Sources Formats names of newspapers within citation templates
- User:Anomie/ajaxpreview.js adds a preview button that will show references when editing a section
- User:BrandonXLF/Autoref replaces the reference button in the editing toolbar in the 2010 wikitext editor with a button that allows the use of Citoid to insert an auto generated reference
- User:BrandonXLF/Citoid generates a reference using the Citoid server. Designed for being used inside user scripts.
- user:js/ajaxPreview adds a preview button that will show references when editing a section
- User:Salix alba/Citoid Generates citation templates using the Citoid server. Standalone javascript which can be used outside of Visual Editor.
Beta and obsolete
Beta
- Cite4Wiki Phoenix
- Ref++ PubMed search (Beta, November 2009)
Obsolete:
Deprecated
The following bot-filled templates are deprecated.
- {{Cite doi}}
- {{Cite jstor}}
- {{Cite pmid}}
Documentation
These templates can be used in documentation:
Typing aids
- {{cite *}}: shortcut for {{Citation/core}}
- {{cite xxx}}: shortcut for Wikipedia:Citation templates
- {{cite.php}}: shortcut for mw:Extension:Cite
- {{cs1}}: shortcut for Help: Citation Style 1
- {{cs2}}: shortcut for Help: Citation Style 2
- {{fnote}}: shortcut for Help:Footnotes
- {{ldr}}: shortcut for List-defined references
- {{paren}}: shortcut for Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing
- {{sfnote}}: shortcut for Help:Shortened footnotes
- {{vcite}}: shortcut for Help:Citation Style Vancouver
Navboxes
- {{Citation Style 1}}: navbox for Citation Style 1 templates
- {{Wikipedia referencing}}: navbox for referencing help pages
Debug
- {{Cite compare}}: a tool for comparing the output of the various versions of a Citation Style 1 template
Documentation
- {{Citation Style documentation}}: modular documentation for Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2
- {{Harvard citation documentation}}: documentation for Harvard citations
- {{Markup}}: show markup and rendered output side by side
- {{Refname rules}}: rules for names for footnotes and groups
Replication
- {{Dummy backlink}}: replicate footnote backlinks
- {{Dummy ref}}: replicate footnote in-text cite
- {{Fake heading}}: replicate headings
- {{Fake notes and references}}: replicate Notes and References headings