Reference Manager for WordPress with Footnotes, Citations, Bibliographies, Tooltips and Glossary

Documentation | Live Demo | Shortcodes & Blocks Reference | Changelog | Support

Add and maintain sources in WordPress from DOI, ISBN, PubMed, YouTube and more, then publish citations, footnotes and bibliographies from your reference library. Add tooltips and glossaries to define and connect terminology across your content.

CiteKit keeps the source information behind your published content in WordPress, so references can be checked, corrected and used to generate citations, bibliographies and citation metadata throughout the site.

🧩 Simple footnotes when that’s all you need. Complete reference management when you need more.

Activate what you need. Disable what you don’t. Under CiteKit → Modules, switch on Footnotes, Tooltips, References (the Reference Library, citations, bibliographies and citation styles), Reference Sets, Glossary and the Browser extension one by one, or pick a preset: Footnotes only for numbered footnotes with no library, styles or bibliographies to set up, or Complete toolkit for everything. A module that is switched off loads none of its code, editor controls, admin screens or scheduled jobs. Its data is kept, content already published with it keeps showing, and switching it back on brings it back as it was.

🎯 Built for content that cites its sources:

• Research and academic blogs
• Health, medical, and nutrition sites citing studies and clinical guidelines
• Legal, policy, and government-focused publishers
• Finance and business analysis
• Product reviews and comparison sites
• Independent publishers and journalists
• AI-assisted content teams that need real, verifiable sources
• Agencies managing citations across many client sites

📚 It includes:

• Reference Library — keep source records in one library across your WordPress site. Search and filter references, see which published posts use them and which are cited only in drafts, and clean out empty references nothing cites in one click.
• Source lookup, pasting and manual entry — look up sources using URLs and YouTube links, DOIs, ISBNs, PubMed IDs, or title search; paste a reference written in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver or ABNT style and have it split into its details; or enter one by hand. Every detail can be reviewed and edited before the reference is saved.
• Source types for online publishing — web pages, journal articles, books and chapters, reports, news, theses, datasets and standards, plus videos, social posts, wiki articles and code repositories, films, TV episodes, podcast episodes, music recordings and audiobooks. Each records what identifies the exact version cited, from a DOI to a wiki revision id to a commit, or a series, season and episode.
• Reference import and export — import existing references from BibTeX, RIS, or CSL-JSON and export CiteKit references back into those formats for use in other reference-management and publishing systems. References already in your library are recognised by DOI, PubMed ID or ISBN and skipped, so importing twice doesn’t create duplicates.
• Multiple citation styles — publish references using APA, MLA, Chicago Author-Date, Chicago Notes-Bibliography, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, AMA, Nature, or Web-Native. Author-date styles cite as (Smith, 2024) in the text; numbered styles cite as [1] or a superscript number. Choose one style for the whole site; each style uses its standard bibliography heading unless you set your own.
• Reference Sets — make named, reusable groups of references from your library, such as My Publications, Selected Publications, a course reading list or a project’s sources, and show one anywhere with [reference_set id="my-publications"] or the Reference Set block. Order a set by hand or by newest, oldest, title or author, and group it by year or source type. A reference can be in any number of sets, and editing it in the library updates every set it’s in.
• Reference reuse — cite the same source from multiple posts while maintaining one underlying source record instead of duplicating its metadata throughout the site.
• Structured creators — record each author or editor as a person or an organization, so institutional names are published whole and personal names are inverted or initialised as the citation style requires. Films, broadcasts, podcasts, recordings and audiobooks also record directors, writers, producers, performers, hosts, composers and narrators.
• CiteBox — every source a post cites, listed under the editor as it will appear in the bibliography, with missing details flagged. Open any of them to fill in or correct its details, or rename its citation ID across every post that uses it. Works in the block editor, the classic editor, Divi and other page builders.
• Citation link checker — check the URLs attached to references and see which still work, which are dead, which sites wouldn’t answer the check, and which are still unchecked. Checks run a few links at a time and pick up where they stopped.
• Portable references and citations — content created outside WordPress can carry structured source data with it, allowing CiteKit to reconstruct and reuse the corresponding Reference Library records when the content is published.

✍️ CiteKit Reference Manager for WordPress also includes additional publishing features:

• Citations — insert inline citations connected to structured references throughout WordPress content.
• Bibliographies — generate formatted, backlinked bibliographies from the references cited in a post, with configurable headings and citation styles.
• Footnotes — add numbered footnotes with hover and keyboard previews, notes that open in the text on phones, and a complete numbered footnote list that prints in full.
• Tooltips — add inline definitions, explanations, and asides using dashed or dotted terms or superscript symbols, with the explanatory content displayed on hover.
• Glossary — maintain a separate structured terminology library containing terms, definitions, aliases, concepts, related terms, examples, and URLs; import and export glossary data; promote tooltip definitions into reusable glossary terms; and publish a glossary or an index of it. Glossary terms are published with schema.org DefinedTermSet data.
• Glossary term pages — give every term its own URL under the glossary page, with a definition, aliases, related terms, examples and source links. Renamed terms redirect from their old URL, removed terms redirect to the glossary page, and addresses that never existed return a proper 404.
• Glossary SEO — per-term titles, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags and schema.org DefinedTerm data, with sitemap entries for every term. Works with WordPress core sitemaps, Yoast SEO and Rank Math.
• Glossary auto-linking — optional: switch it on and the first mention of a term in your content links to its glossary entry, skipping headings, existing links and code. Links are added as the page renders, so switching it off puts everything back.
• Glossary search and A–Z — filter a long glossary as you type and jump to a letter, without leaving the page.
• Linked tooltips — a tooltip linked to a glossary term shows the term’s current definition, so editing the term once updates every tooltip linked to it.
• Editor toolbar — Cite, Tooltip and Footnote buttons on the Paragraph block toolbar. In headings, lists, quotes and tables, use the [cite], [tooltip] and [footnote] shortcodes.

⭐ CiteKit Premium

• Custom Citation Style Builder — build your own in-text and bibliography formats (author order, punctuation, italics, separators) with a live preview, applied site-wide, per post type, or per post.
• Multi-style switching — give any post, or any one bibliography, its own citation style instead of one style for the whole site.
• Global reference editing — edit a reference in your Reference Library and the change propagates to every post that cites it.
• Reference Tags — label references with tags such as My Publication, Methods or Project Alpha, right in the Reference Library’s details panel; filter the library by tag, rename or delete a tag everywhere at once, and add tags="…" to [cite] shortcodes you import. Tags travel in CiteKit’s CSL-JSON export and as keywords in BibTeX and RIS. If Premium lapses, your tags are kept and come back when you renew.
• In-post reference search — search your Reference Library and insert a predefined reference right from the post editor.
• Custom post type support — use CiteKit on all posts, pages, and custom post types, and apply a custom-built citation style per post.
• Citation schema — publish schema.org / JSON-LD data for the sources a post cites, switched on per post, so search engines and other tools can read the citation metadata.
• Rich footnotes & tooltips — a native rich footnote and tooltip editor: add formatting, links, lists, images, alt text, and captions directly in WordPress, without writing custom markup.
• Glossary sync from Google Sheets — keep the glossary in a sheet and let the site follow it on a schedule. Every sync is all or nothing: a broken row never takes the live glossary down, and you get the line number that caused it.
• Multiple glossaries — run more than one glossary, each with its own page, URLs, sync source and structured data — a glossary per brand, per section, or per language.
• Glossary term control — formatted definitions and images on term pages, a per-term SEO title and description, auto-linking rules per post type, and a report of which posts use which terms.

⚙️ Try These Free Tools from CiteKit

Use CiteKit’s free browser tools to find source information, generate citations and bibliographies, check citation links and create citation schema.

• Bibliography Generator
• Citation Generator
• Citation Link Checker
• Citation Schema Generator

🔌 External Services

CiteKit Reference Manager can look up source details for you instead of making you type them. Each lookup is something you start, in the admin, by pasting a URL, DOI, ISBN or PubMed ID, or by searching. Nothing is sent from the front end of your site, and no personal data or site data is transmitted — only the identifier you entered.

Crossref — when you add a source by DOI or by a link that contains one, search by title, or add a web page that states its DOI but not its authors, date or type of work, the DOI or your search text is sent to api.crossref.org to retrieve the work’s title, authors, journal and publication date.
Privacy policy

Open Library (Internet Archive) — when you add a source by ISBN, the ISBN is sent to openlibrary.org to retrieve the book’s title, authors and publisher.
API documentation · Terms of use

Google Books — when an ISBN is not found at Open Library, the ISBN is sent to www.googleapis.com/books as a fallback for the same details.
Terms of service · Privacy policy

NCBI E-utilities (PubMed) — when you add a source by PubMed ID or by a pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov link, the PMID is sent to eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov to retrieve the article’s title, authors and journal.
Website and data usage policies

YouTube — when you add a source whose URL is a YouTube video, that URL is sent to YouTube’s oEmbed endpoint at www.youtube.com to retrieve the video title and channel.
Terms of service · Privacy policy

Web pages you add or check — when you add a source by URL, your site requests that page directly to read its citation metadata. The link checker does the same for sources already in your library, to report which links no longer resolve. These requests go to whatever address you saved. A doi.org or PubMed link is looked up at Crossref or PubMed as described above; for any other address no third party is involved.

CiteKit.com — the What’s New with CiteKit box on the Dashboard, shown to administrators, reads the latest release notes and the five newest blog posts from the public pages of citekit.com, at most twice a day. The request sends nothing about your site, its users or its content. Hide the box under Screen Options on the Dashboard.
Privacy policy

Freemius — the plugin’s licensing and update service. It is contacted for licence checks, updates and, if you choose to buy, checkout. It also handles the optional opt-in; if you skip the opt-in, no account data is shared.
Terms of service · Privacy policy