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Extract Citations (BibTeX)

AI
References as a BibTeX block + readable reference list.
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What you'll get: a BibTeX block + human-readable reference list with auto-generated citation keys. For another use, try AI · Extract Entities (people/orgs/places/dates).

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AI tools process your PDF in memory, send only the extracted text to the model, and discard everything immediately. No file is persisted on our servers.
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Clean output, no branding, no daily limits.
Pay only for what you use
Purchased credits never expire. Cancel anytime.

Why people use Extract Citations (BibTeX)

Citation extraction surfaces every reference in a PDF as a BibTeX block (importable into LaTeX / Zotero / Mendeley) plus a readable reference list. Useful for literature review, bibliography building, and verification of cited sources.

Literature review reference compilation
Run each paper in your reading list through the extractor, accumulate citations into a single BibTeX file. Faster than manual entry and avoids the typo-in-DOI errors that plague hand-built bibliographies.
Thesis bibliography building
Theses cite hundreds of sources. The extractor pulls citations from each cited PDF’s own reference list, building a candidate bibliography for your own thesis. You still curate which to actually cite, but the data-entry step is automated.
Citation verification
Verify the citations in your own draft by comparing the extracted list with what you actually cited. Surfaces missing references or formatting errors before submission.
Format conversion (e.g. APA → BibTeX)
Documents with reference lists in non-BibTeX format (APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver) get extracted into BibTeX. Useful when migrating an old paper’s bibliography into a new project.
Reference overlap analysis
Run two papers’ extractors, compare the BibTeX outputs to surface citation overlap. Useful for understanding intellectual lineage and shared sources across related work.

How Extract Citations works

Three steps. Sign in to run, zero retention — files never persisted on our servers.

  1. STEP 1
    Drop the source PDF
    PDF up to 100 MB. Works on academic papers, theses, books, and any doc with a structured reference list.
  2. STEP 2
    We extract + format
    Server-side text extraction (with reference-list section detection), then per-citation parsing into BibTeX entries. Author / year / title / journal / volume / issue / pages / DOI populated from the reference text plus any embedded metadata.
  3. STEP 3
    Get BibTeX + readable list
    Output: BibTeX block (paste into your .bib file directly) AND a human-readable reference list (paste into a Notion / Markdown doc). Page citation indicates where each reference appeared in the source.

What makes pdfcraft ai different

  • Citations on every claim
    Every AI summary, answer, and translation links back to the page it came from. You can verify the source before relying on the output. Hallucination is bounded, not blind.
  • Pay only for what you use
    No subscription. Purchased credits never expire. Cancel anytime. Cost shown before you run — exact credit amount appears after upload.
  • Multi-provider routing, no vendor lock-in
    We balance multiple AI providers per call to optimise cost and quality. If one has an outage, the next call automatically tries another. You're not bound to a single vendor's pricing or downtime.
  • Zero retention by design
    Your PDF lives in memory only as long as the AI call needs it, then it's discarded — nothing is persisted to our servers. We don't fine-tune models on your data. Verifiable in your dashboard's audit log.
  • Honest about model limits
    When a doc exceeds the model's context window we surface that the output was truncated (we render result.wasTruncated in every AI tool's UI). When a number can't be verified from the source we flag it. No silent failures.

Frequently asked questions

Are the BibTeX entries correct?
Strong on standard journal-article references with embedded DOIs. Weaker on books / preprints / non-English sources / older formats with non-standard structure. Verify the BibTeX before submission — common errors are author-order swaps and journal name abbreviations.
Will it work for non-academic citations?
Best on academic-style references (Author, Year, Title, Journal/Publisher). Trade-press citations / blog citations / web citations parse but the BibTeX entry types map imperfectly (everything becomes “@misc” if structure is unclear). For grey-literature heavy bibliographies, expect manual cleanup.
Does it dedupe references across multiple PDFs?
Per-PDF extraction by default. For cross-doc deduplication, run each extractor and merge the BibTeX outputs in your reference manager (Zotero / Mendeley both deduplicate on import).
Will it output in styles other than BibTeX?
BibTeX (most universal for LaTeX) plus a readable reference list. Other styles (RIS for EndNote, APA / MLA / Chicago formatted) on the roadmap. For now, import the BibTeX into Zotero / Mendeley and export to your target format.
What’s the credit cost?
3 credits per doc. Cost is fixed regardless of reference count.
What if a citation is missing from the output?
Common causes: footnote-style citations (not in a reference list), in-line URL references, citations to personal communication. The extractor focuses on structured reference lists; non-list citations may not be captured. Manually add those as needed.

Researching multiple papers?

Research Paper Summarizer generates structured summaries with embedded BibTeX from each paper — useful when you need both the citation AND the content distilled.

Try Research Paper Summarizer

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