This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut WP:CITETOOL

The following tools can help you assemble a citation from limited information, with limited effort. These are tools with a variety of interfaces that provide a complete formatted reference based on a few initial details.

Tools

• Citer: Converts USER LINK a DOI, ISBN, OCLC, or URL into a citation and shortened footnote. It also can generate citations for many news websites.
  
• Biomedical citation maker by User:Badgettrg. Converts a Pubmed ID (PMID), DOI, PMCID, NCT to {{cite journal}}, {{cite pmid}}, 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.
• BibGuru: A full-fledged reference management solution used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide.^[1]
• Citation Hunt: A tool for browsing snippets of Wikipedia articles that lack citations.
• 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.
• DOI Wikipedia reference generator: Converts a digital object identifier (DOI) into {{cite journal}}.
• DTU Informatics PMID to Cite journal: Converts a PubMed ID (PMID) into a {{cite journal}}.
• MakeRef: A form for creating various {{cite}} 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.
• WebRef: A bookmarklet automating the filling of the {{cite web}} template.
• Wikipedia AutoReferencer, Microsoft word tool to convert embedded links to wikitext
• Wikipedia citation tool for Google Books: Converts a Google Books URL into {{cite book}}. Wikipedia has thousands of bare URL citations that could be completed using this tool. (Note: due to a change to its interface (as of approx. Nov. 2019), Google Books' default URLs no longer work with this tool – one must switch to the "classic view".)
• 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, 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.
• OttoBib – Generates an alphabetized bibliography of books from a list of International Standard Book Number (ISBN) numbers, with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX, or Wikipedia format (also generates a permalink)
• 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; can be added to the toolbox with this JavaScript: User:SQL/refcheck.js
• User:CitationTool – Semi-bot for finding citation errors and fixing them
• WebCite – WebCite archives a copy of an online source, so a citation can link to the archived copy as well as to the original URL (in case the latter changes in future)
• 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:

• User:Smith609/Cite
• {{Cite isbn}}

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/Cite.php
• {{cs1}}: shortcut for Help: Citation Style 1
• {{cs2}}: shortcut for Help: Citation Style 2
• {{fnote1}}: shortcut for Wikipedia:Footnote1
• {{fnote2}}: shortcut for Wikipedia:Footnote2
• {{fnote3}}: shortcut for Wikipedia:Footnote3
• {{fnote4}}: shortcut for Wikipedia:Footnote4
• {{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

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

"About BibGuru". Bibguru. Retrieved 2021-03-09.

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{T} Wikipedia citation tool for Google Books

1: Find a book you want to cite on Google Books. Copy the URL of the book from the address bar, and paste it below. Then press "Load". Example book.

Example book (copy and paste above): http://books.google.com/books?id=aqmAc2fFsAUC&pg;=PA90

Try also: Wikipedia citation tool for DOI or The New York Times.
Also available from a user script: refToolPlus.

Made by Apoc2400. Send feedback to apoc2400 (at) gmail.com or my talk page. Using some html and js from refToolbar by Mr.Z-man. Bookmarklet for direct access from Google Books. Source code in Python.

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Dave's Template Filler (for lack of a better name) is a tool for generating template markup quickly and simply. It uses identifiers such as ISBNs and PubMed IDs to fill templates such as {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}}. (If you haven't added references on Wikipedia before, see also Wikipedia:Footnotes#How_to_use for additional context.)

The tool is available here: citation-template-filling.

Supported templates

Usage

There are several ways to use the template filler.

Web-based tool

The web-based tool is the most common way to access the template filler:

• http://tools.wmflabs.org/citation-template-filling/cgi-bin/index.cgi

Its usage is mostly self-explanatory. Options may need further explanation. (See Options below.)

Firefox keywords

Firefox allows keyword-based access to the template filler. From the template filler page, select the desired identifier (eg, PubMed ID, ISBN, etc.), right-click (or control-click) on the search field, and select "Add a keyword for this search". Enter a name, a keyword (eg, "pmid"), and press enter. Type keyword id into Firefox's location bar, where keyword is the keyword you just entered (eg, "pmid") and id is a value for this identifier (eg, "123455"). A complete example would be pmid 123455, which would load this page.

Bookmarklets

Bob Badgett maintains a few bookmarklets for making the template filler even more accessible. These are available at his website, Diberri bookmarklets.

Greasemonkey

Screenshot of the Greasemonkey user script in action.

If you have Firefox's Greasemonkey extension, you can use these user scripts to automatically create links to PubMed and Google Book citations:

• PubMed
• Google Books

Perl module

The template filler can be called programatically from Perl using WWW::Wikipedia::TemplateFiller, a module available from CPAN.

XML output

The web-based template filler can generate XML to make for easier programmatic access using Ajax or other frameworks. This can be accomplished by adding "&format=xml" to the end of the URL, as in:

http://toolserver.org/~diberri/cgi-bin/templatefiller/index.cgi?type=pubmed_id&id=123455&format=xml

Options

The template filler recognizes a number of options that customize its output:

Fill vertically

Fills the template vertically as opposed to horizontally.

Show extended fields

Lists "extended" fields in addition to the standard fields of that template. The definition of "extended" varies based on template.

Pad parameter names and values

Adds a space before and after each pipe character ("|"), possibly improving readability

Add access date (if relevant)

If the current template recognizes an access_date parameter, then fill it with the current date. Not recommended when citing journals.

Add ref tag

Add  to the output.

Add URL (if available)

If the current template recognizes a url parameter, then fill it with an appropriate URL.

For {{cite journal}} if the template filler finds a PubMedCentral PMC or a URL for the journal article, the article title is linked. If both, the article title is linked to the URL value and the PMC value is shown. Similarly for {{cite book}} any url parameter links on the title field.

Don't strip trailing period from article title

(Only applies to PubMed and PubMedCentral sources.) PubMed and PubMedCentral articles nearly always end with punctuation, and {{cite journal}} adds a period to the end of the title parameter by default. To omit a duplicate period, the template filler by default strips trailing periods from the article title. This option disables the routine stripping of trailing periods.

Don't use et al for author list

(Only applies to PubMed and PubMedCentral sources.) PubMed and PubMedCentral articles may have many authors. When this number exceeds six (arbitrarily), the template filler uses the first three authors and appends et al to the author list. This option disables this feature so that et al is never used.

Link journal title

(Only applies to PubMed and PubMedCentral sources.) Links the journal article in the template markup. Note that this will link the abbreviation of the journal, so it is possible that the link will be red even if an article for the journal exists.

How to find a PMID

Despite its name, the PubMed database indexes papers from many fields that are only indirectly associated with medicine. If you can find the PMID associated with an article, generating a citation becomes very easy. However, it can be difficult sometimes to find a journal article in Pubmed. Here are some tips that may help:

• Use Google search instead, and append "PMID"
  • If you're searching for it, other people have searched for it, and some of them may have found it. If a paper is well-known (for example, PMID 13054692), you can take advantage of the fact that other people are probably linking to it as well, and thus the paper you want may float to the top. Note the results of the following search: http://www.google.com/search?q=watson+crick+pmid
  • If you know the title: http://www.google.com/search?q=pmid+%22Molecular+structure+of+nucleic+acids%22
  • These approaches don't always work. Sometimes the title is short, and the names of the authors are common words. Or you might only have a partial citation. Some citations only list the journal, author, and indexing information. In this case, try searching on the author's name, the year, and the first page. (Don't search on the last page. Some citations might list pages "737-738", and others might list pages "737-8". Adding the 738 could reduce your chances of finding the right citation.)
  • If there are many authors, try using the last name of the first three or four authors. Don't use middle initials (there is variation in how these are rendered.) Skip authors with a diacritic.
  • Don't use the journal name unless you have no other choice (these abbreviations vary greatly)
  • You can also try Google Book Search and Google Scholar (though backlinks don't help as much with these tools.) Even if you don't have free full access to the resource in question, you can sometimes get information to help you refine your search.
• Use PubMed, but with search parameters

Questions

Please direct questions, concerns, and bug reports over to User talk:Diberri/Template filler.