Citation Generator

WHAT IT DOES The Citation Generator extracts bibliographic metadata from the current webpage and produces properly formatted academic citations in five major styles: APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th, Harvard, and IEEE. It pulls information such as title, author, publication date, publisher, journal name, DOI, and ISBN from meta tags and visible page content. You can review and edit all extracted fields before generating a citation. Each citation can be copied to the clipboard with one click. The tool also maintains a local history of generated citations, allowing you to revisit and reuse previous references without re-entering data. WHERE IT RUNS This userscript works on any webpage that contains scholarly or reference-worthy content — from academic journals, news articles, and blog posts to books, documentation pages, and institutional repositories. It runs entirely within your browser, requiring no external servers or third-party services. Whether you are a student, researcher, writer, or professional, the Citation Generator streamlines your workflow by eliminating manual citation formatting. HOW TO USE After installation, the panel appears as a floating widget. Use the "Detect from Page" button to automatically populate fields from the page's metadata. Review and manually edit any field if needed. Select your desired citation style from the dropdown menu. Click "Generate Citation" to create a formatted citation, which appears in the preview area. Use the "Copy Citation" button to copy it to your clipboard for pasting into papers, reports, or reference managers. All generated citations are automatically saved to a local history list, which you can view and copy from at any time. The "Clear Fields" button resets the form while preserving your history. TECHNICAL MECHANISM — META TAG QUERY AND PATTERN-BASED IDENTIFIER EXTRACTION The Citation Generator employs a systematic multi-selector extraction strategy. It queries standard and scholarly meta tags in priority order (citation_title, og:title, twitter:title, etc.) to capture title data, and similarly for author, date, publisher, and journal fields using schema.org, Dublin Core, and citation-specific metadata. For identifiers, it applies pattern matching against the page's visible text content: DOI extraction uses the canonical 10.\d{4,9}/[-._;()/:A-Z0-9]+ regular expression with case-insensitive matching, while ISBN extraction handles both 10-digit and 13-digit formats with optional hyphenation and "ISBN" prefixes. The date extraction prioritizes ISO 8601 datetime attributes from elements when meta tags are absent. Each citation style is implemented as a pure function that concatenates fields with style-specific punctuation (periods, commas, parentheses, italics markers) and ordering rules, following the official style guides' formatting conventions without external libraries. Citation history is stored as a JSON array in GM_setValue with timestamps and deduplication logic, supporting up to 50 entries with FIFO eviction. THE PANEL The panel is fully draggable and remembers its position per site using GM_setValue. It can be collapsed to a small bubble when not in use and expanded with a single click. The panel supports resizing and includes a snap-to-edge behavior for tidy placement. Pressing the Escape key closes the panel. All interactions are non-blocking and do not interfere with the underlying page functionality. PLEASE NOTE This userscript requires the free BotGentz browser extension to function. Web standards and site structures change over time; if the script stops working as expected, check for updates or contact support. The script does not read, store, or transmit any personal data, passwords, or input fields — it only processes visible metadata and text content, and stores your citation history locally in your browser's GM_setValue storage. No analytics, tracking, or external data sharing is performed. Citations are formatted for general academic use; always verify against the official style guide for your institution.