DEV Community

Cover image for I Built a Free WordPress Citation Plugin for Academic Websites
Sahil Kumar
Sahil Kumar

Posted on • Originally published at thelatexlab.com

I Built a Free WordPress Citation Plugin for Academic Websites

TheLaTeXLab - Citations & Bibliography is a WordPress citation plugin and bibliography plugin for academic bloggers, PhD students, postdocs, and research labs. Easily add citations and a bibliography in your WordPress website: paste a DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN, or arXiv ID and get a clean in-text citation and automatically generate a bibliography in APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver, and other citation styles.

Install the Plugin - TheLaTeXLab - Citation and Bibliography Wordpress Plugin

Perfect for academic blogs, university websites, research group websites, online journals, and personal publication pages.

A modern, actively maintained citation tool, it works as an up-to-date citation and BibTeX plugin for WordPress. It runs in both the block editor (Gutenberg) and the Classic Editor, and it does not lock your content: deactivate the plugin and your in-text citations stay readable as plain text. If you have been looking for an easy way to cite research papers and sources in WordPress, or to turn a DOI into a citation and bibliography, this is the plugin for it.

Full documentation and a step-by-step guide on how to use the plugin: TheLaTeXLab – Citations & Bibliography documentation and how-to guide.

Insert citations from identifiers

  • DOI to BibTeX → thelatexlab.com/doi-to-bibtex/ : paste a DOI, get the verified record from CrossRef.
  • PubMed to BibTeX → thelatexlab.com/pubmed-to-bibtex/ : paste a PubMed ID (PMID) or PMC ID.
  • ISBN to BibTeX → thelatexlab.com/isbn-to-bibtex/ : paste an ISBN-10 or ISBN-13.
  • arXiv to BibTeX → thelatexlab.com/arxiv-to-bibtex/ : paste an arXiv ID.
  • Paste a URL from doi.org, arxiv.org, PubMed, or a publisher page and the plugin extracts and verifies the identifier. A citation is produced only when it can be confidently verified against the source, never guessed.
  • Import existing libraries: BibTeX (.bib) and RIS (.ris) upload.
  • Auto-format a bibliography
  • Eight citation styles: APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 (author-date), Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, Nature, AMA. Selectable per post, with a site-wide default.

Block editor and Classic Editor, both
An "Insert Citation" block for Gutenberg and a toolbar button for the Classic Editor, sharing the same search-or-paste modal.

Publications page mode
A publications list block and the [thelatexlab_publications] shortcode render your references as a sortable, filterable list. Ideal for a researcher's personal site.

Robust by design

  • Citations are stored as portable JSON. Deactivate the plugin and in-text citations stay readable.
  • Resolved metadata is cached for 30 days.
  • Compatible with PHP 7.4+ and WordPress 6.0+.
  • Built and designed for researchers who need fast, accurate academic citations in WordPress.

Top comments (0)