Citations

Getting from "a pile of PDFs" to "a correctly formatted bibliography in my paper" runs along this path in Scholardo:

PDF into Docs → generate an entry in Refs → complete the metadata → insert citations while writing → export the bibliography

How citations render

Scholardo uses citeproc-js + CSL — the same standard behind Zotero and Mendeley. Your .bib file is the data; a CSL style file decides how it looks.

Four styles ship built in:

Style	Used in
APA	Psychology, education, social sciences
Chicago (author-date)	Humanities, history
MLA	Literature, linguistics
GB/T 7714-2015 (author-date)	Chinese academic publishing

Locales cover English and Simplified Chinese, so fixed terms like "et al." and "accessed" follow the locale.

Rendering is fully offline

citeproc-js and the CSL styles are bundled in the app. Rendering a citation makes no network requests; your reference data doesn't leave the machine to get formatted.

Importing more styles

Under Settings → Citation Styles:

• Import citation style from URL — paste the URL of any style from the Zotero style repository
• User styles folder — drop .csl files in directly
• Check for style updates — see whether imported styles have newer versions

Bundled styles update with the app; you don't manage those.

Completing entries

Incomplete BibTeX entries are the norm — anything copied off a web page usually has a title and authors and little else.

Open the entry in Refs and hit Fill missing fields. It takes the DOI (or, failing that, the title) and merges results from:

• Crossref
• Semantic Scholar
• OpenAlex

Title matching without a DOI carries risk

Title search has guardrails, but identically titled papers — and conference versus journal versions of the same work — can still match wrongly. Glance at the year and venue after a fill; it's worth the two seconds.

Generating an entry from a full text

Right-click any document in Docs → Add to References, and Scholardo derives an entry from the PDF's metadata.

Importing a paper's own bibliography

Open a Refs entry → Import the references this work cites in the toolbar, and you can bulk-import the works that paper cites.

Coverage depends on whether the publisher submitted a citation list to Crossref:

Source	Typically
Major journal publishers	Full metadata
Some publishers (e.g. ACS)	DOIs only; needs a second fill pass
arXiv preprints	Usually nothing

You're shown how many entries were actually retrieved, and pick what to import.

Pairing Docs with Refs

Ideally every full text has an entry and every entry has a full text. The banner above the Refs list shows you where the gaps are and offers fixes — see Refs.

For a missing full text, Attach queries Unpaywall for an open-access version and downloads it if found. It only works for entries with a DOI, and only finds legitimately open-access copies.

Inserting citations while writing

Select a passage in a manuscript's reading mode and the floating toolbar's Find citations has the AI locate supporting literature in your Refs library and insert the citation.

Citations render in whatever style you currently have selected. If insertion fails the text is left untouched — no half-written fragments.

Rendering a bibliography in bulk

Select several entries in Refs (Cmd / Shift) and open them for an aggregate preview: every selected entry rendered together in the current style, ready to paste into a paper.

What agents can do

Agents reach references over MCP:

• list_refs — enumerate entries
• pairing_audit — report gaps between Docs and Refs
• search_papers / search_openalex — search external paper metadata
• lookup_unpaywall — find open-access full text
• download_pdf — download it into Docs

So "find and import every methodology paper this review mentions" is an instruction you can give directly.

See also

• Refs — References — where the UI is and what each button does
• Writing — inserting citations as you write