 | 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.
Guide
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-08-05/Tips and tricks - A short overview of various popular citation tools. If you don't know where to start, this is a good read.
General
- 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
Generators
| Editor tools |
|---|
| Editing aids |
| Citation tools |
| Things to review |
| Customisation |
- 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
- 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.
- Wikipedia AutoReferencer, Microsoft word tool to convert embedded links to wikitext
- Wikipedia-References-Creator: A Firefox addon for creation of references (output changeable).
- SnipManager adds a ribbon interface to add citations
- wikEd
- The visual editor helps users format, insert, and edit sources by simply providing a DOI, URL, ISBN etc., see WP:REFVISUAL.
- The citation generation tool of the Visual Editor (WP:REFVISUAL) can also be used when editing the article source, for users who have enabled the 2017 wikitext editor in their preferences.
- Template:Ref info, which can aid evaluating what kind of citation style was used to write the article
- Based on Citoid:
- Cite templates in Visual Editor
- User:Salix alba/Citoid a client for the mw:citoid server which generates Citation Style 1 templates from urls.
- Hosted on tools.wmflabs.org:
- Wikipedia:refToolbar 2.0, used in the Source Editor
- Citation bot
Templates
- 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
- CiteCompletion for AutoWikiBrowser – A custom module for AWB to complete citations of common English-language news sites
- 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
- User:CitationTool – Semi-bot for finding citation errors and fixing them
Bookmarklets
- Cite4Wiki, an XUL-based add-on for Pale Moon to generate {{cite web}} and {{cite news}} for the browser's current page.
- citemark (JavaScript) – A bookmarklet to help create {{cite web}} templates; see the developer's page for details
- 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.
- WebRef: A bookmarklet automating the filling of the {{cite web}} template.
- User:Ark25/RefScript, a JavaScript bookmarklet – creates references in one click, works for many newspapers
- User:V111P/js/WebRef, a script or bookmarklet automating the filling of the {{cite web}} template. You use the script on the page you want to cite.
Desktop software
- Wikicite is a free program that helps editors to create citations for their Wikipedia contributions using citation templates. It is written in Visual Basic .NET, making it suitable only for users with the .NET Framework installed on Windows, or, for other platforms, the Mono alternative framework. Wikicite and its source code is freely available; see the developer's page for further details.
Reference management software
Reference management software can output formatted citations in several styles, including Wikipedia citation templates.
- Comparison of reference management software – side-by-side comparison of various reference management software
- Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero – essay on using Zotero to quickly add citations to articles.
- 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
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.
Tools to improve existing citations
- Citation expander automatically adds missing data to citations using citation templates, and makes corrections to their formatting
- reFill expands bare url references
Duplicate reference finders
Finding duplicate references by examining reference lists is difficult. There are some tools that can help:
- AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) will identify and (usually) correct exact duplicates between <ref>...</ref> tags. See the documentation.
- User:Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences This script detects and displays references with duplicate URLs. It also calculates how similar the visible text of those references is as a percentage.
- URL Extractor For Web Pages and Text can identify Web citations with the exact same URL but otherwise possibly different. Most differences are not significant, but sometimes different page numbers from the same URL are cited. Occasionally references to the same Web page might be followed by different non-significant tracking parameters (
?utm ...,#ixzz...), and will not be listed as duplicates.- Step 1: click "Enter URL", enter (paste) the URL of the Wikipedia article and click "Load",
- Step 2: tick "Only Display duplicate URL addresses" (which unticks "Remove duplicate addresses")
- Optional: Tick the radio button "Do not show", tick the box at the beginning of its line, and enter (paste) into the box
web.archive.org,wikipedia,wikimedia,wikiquote,wikidata,worldcat
- Optional: Tick the radio button "Do not show", tick the box at the beginning of its line, and enter (paste) into the box
- Step 3: Click Extract.
- Then the duplicates will be listed, and must be manually merged. There will often be false positives;
web.archive.orgURLs, in particular, are a nuisance as they contain the original URLs, which show as duplicates. The optional part of Step 2 eliminates the archive URLs, but unfortunately the list of duplicates includes the archived pages. The wiki* URLs are less of a problem as they can just be ignored.
Libraries for developers
- User:Richiez wrote tools to automatically handle citations for a whole article at a time. These were marked as obsolete in 2016. They convert occurrences of {{pmid|XXXXXXXX}} (PubMed) or {{isbn|XXXXXXXXXX}} to properly formatted footnote or Harvard-style references. Written in Ruby and requires a working installation with basic libraries.
- pubmed2wikipedia.xsl an XSL stylesheet transforming the XML output of PubMed to Wikipedia refs.
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
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