Quick & Robust Citations

Focus on forming your thoughts, not formatting citations.


Cite from a Book

  • cmd-T for Citation, then enter the name of the book or author, hit ‘enter’ and select the book.

Cite from an Academic PDF

  • cmd-C to copy in Reader & then cmd-V to paste in Author

This generally–though not always–works because the PDF has what we call Visual-Meta attached, which is essentially all the citation information in BibTeX format.

If a document does not have Visual-Meta, but it does have its DOI on the first page, when you open it, you will be asked if you would like to use the DOI to create Visual-Meta. When this is done the document is ready for you to copy from whoever you want to cite it. If you don’t know what a DOI is, that probably means that your academic field does not support it yet. Sorry about that.

Note that you do not have to select text, you can also simply open the document and cmd-C to copy the document and paste in Author to cite the document without a citation.

Exporting with Citations

When you Export your document, the citation will be styled to your preference and added to the Reference section.

 Considerably quicker than citing in Word when you are reading

Author Features