Blog

CiteDrive 3.1 – Announcement and Roadmap

Feb 26, 2023

We are pleased to announce some significant CiteDrive updates! We’ve worked hard to bring you the most up-to-date features to help you manage your research and academic projects more effectively.

First and foremost, we are pleased to present the first iteration of the “Main library” feature, which has been highly requested by our users. This new feature will allow you to organize and centralize all of your references into different projects.

We have also made several enhancements to CiteDrive’s performance. We refactored the code and fixed errors and bugs to make it faster and more responsive. Furthermore, we have updated the CiteDrive style to make it look crisper and sharper.

We’re also excited to tell you about our new tagging system, which allows for easier organization and retrieval of your references. More information about this feature can be found in the relevant section.

Main library Roadmap

CiteDrive is a research management tool that takes a project-based approach to help you manage your research more efficiently. With CiteDrive, you can organize your references and teams into different projects. For example, you can collaborate with a completely different team on a paper they want to bring into various document formats, such as LaTeX, Overleaf, Pandoc, RStudio, Quarto, R Markdown, and more. Each project can have different documents with unique structures, and CiteDrive makes it easy to manage all of them in one place.

However, many users have requested a way to easily copy references from one project to another and even clone entire projects. Additionally, they have expressed a desire to manage a central library, known as the “main.bib” project, from which they can assign references to different projects while still maintaining a project-based approach. This allows users to organize references within the structure of a paper, thesis, book, or other formats and collaborate with team members to annotate, discuss, and keep references synchronized within a common project, such as Overleaf. The system provides version and collision control to ensure that multiple users can work together smoothly to prevent issues such as duplicate keys.

Roadmap and status

CiteDrive 3.1 marks a significant update to our platform, as we have changed the data structure and infrastructure to prepare for upcoming releases. Also, you will be able to clone projects.

Our team has planned a series of releases in the coming weeks, building upon the groundwork laid in this update.

New Tagging

Tagging will be made more accessible by extracting the relationships directly from your bibtex entry using the field

@article{...
  keywords={keyword1,keyword2,...}
}

This feature will be especially useful for those using CiteDrive with JabRef.

In the pipeline

Last little note: In addition to offline LaTeX editors and Markdown-based systems such as Quarto and R Markdown, we are developing extensions for Jupyter Notebook, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs.

Thank you for choosing CiteDrive as your reference management tool; we are confident these updates will enhance your experience. We will love to hear from you if you have any feedback or suggestions.

Using natbib with BibTeX and Overleaf

Feb 1, 2023

The natbib package revolutionizes the standard \cite{*} command in LaTeX, when using BibTeX; providing a plethora of options for author-year schemes and displaying both textual and parenthetical information when using BibTeX. With this enhanced feature, you can easily customize your citations to suit any style preferences!

Why use natbib?

natbib is a LaTeX package that allows you to use bibtex references more freely. It includes many citation commands and citation styles not found in standard bibtex, as well as the ability to customize existing citation styles to meet your needs; most notably, ab citation style requirements. One of the advantages of using natbib is the ability to generate author-year in a narrative or textual format. As an alternative, you could look into BibLaTeX, which includes all of these features on top of a much more feature-rich ecosystem and a very robust framework.

Getting started

Step 1: Create a bibliography

We recommend using CiteDrive to create the.bib-file because it assists you with formatting and saves articles from your browser directly to your bibliography. Among many other features, such as native BibTeX/BibLaTeX support, collaboration, error handling, and formatting, Overleaf allows you to keep your bibliographies in sync. Overleaf has more information.

Your bib-file, which you can also create manually if you don’t want to use CiteDrive, is a bibliographic reference file that LaTeX uses to format bibliographies and citations. Here’s an example of a straightforward bib-file:

@book{knuth1984texbook,
  title        = {The {\TeX}book},
  author       = {Donald E. Knuth},
  year         = 1984,
  publisher    = {Addison-Wesley}
}

@article{lamport1994latex,
  title        = {{LaTeX}: A Document Preparation System},
  author       = {Leslie Lamport},
  year         = 1994,
  journal      = {Addison-Wesley}
}

@inproceedings{gosling1995java,
  title        = {The Java Language Environment},
  author       = {James Gosling and Henry McGilton},
  year         = 1995,
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Sun Microsystems
                        Symposium on the Java Language},
  publisher    = {Sun Microsystems}
}

In this example, we have three references of different types (book, article, and inproceedings). Each reference is given a unique identifier (e.g. knuth1984texbook), which can be used to cite the reference in the LaTeX document.

Step 2: Create a TeX file

Here’s how to get everything together in our tex-file after we’ve created our.bib-file:

Include the natbib package in your LaTeX document by adding the following line to the preamble:

\usepackage{natbib}

Specify the citation style you want to use. For example, if you want to use the numeric style, add the following line:

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

We will include our previously generated bibliographic reference file, which is in.bib format, in your LaTeX document using the bibliography command — notice that we omit the file extension.

\bibliography{references}

To cite a reference in the text, use the \cite or \citep command followed by the reference identifier:

As discussed in \cite{knuth1984texbook},
\TeX\ is a powerful typesetting system.

Finally, include the following command to produce the bibliography at the end of your document:

\bibliography

CiteDrive Forum has Moved to GitHub Discussions

Jan 29, 2023

We at CiteDrive are thrilled to announce that we have recently moved our discussion forums to GitHub Discussions. This move was made with the aim of providing our users with a better and more streamlined platform for discussing and sharing their experiences with our reference management and citation tool. Click here to join now!

GitHub Discussions is a new feature introduced by GitHub in 2021 and offers a simple and organized platform for discussions. The platform is designed to be user-friendly and provides a number of features to help keep discussions on-topic and organized.

Our users will now have access to a larger and more engaged GitHub community, which is one of the major benefits of this move (at least one of your hopes and motivations for moving). When they ask general questions about BibTeX/BibLaTeX or the platforms to which CiteDrive connects, they will be able to connect with and learn from other platform users, and we will be able to better manage support requests.

Another benefit of this change is the integration of discussions with Git repositories, which will help CiteDrive become open-source in the future. Our users can then directly reference and link to code snippets, bugs, and related issues from their discussions.

In addition, GitHub Discussions offers thread categorization, reactions, and search capabilities, all aimed at keeping discussions organized and productive.

At CiteDrive, we believe that this move to GitHub Discussions will result in a more productive and engaging experience for our users. We invite all our users to check out the new discussion forums and join the conversation.

Join us in our move to GitHub Discussions and let’s continue to revolutionize reference management and citation!

Parenthetical vs. narrative citations in CiteDrive

Jan 15, 2023

We receive many questions about using CiteDrive to create citations in parentheticals and narratives. Since the app is a BibTeX-based online reference management tool that works with both LaTeX and Pandoc-based systems (such as R Markdown and Quarto) and synchronizes your bibliographies with Overleaf and RStudio, we show you different options depending on the system and package you use.

Parenthetical and narrative citations - what’s the difference?

In a parenthetical citation, you include information about a source in parentheses at the end of a sentence or clause where you are using information from that source. This allows you to identify the source of information without interrupting the flow of your writing. For example:

According to a recent study (Smith, 2020), the average lifespan of a dog is 12 years.

Narrative citation, on the other hand, involves incorporating information about the source into the text of your writing. This typically includes the author’s name and the publication date. For example:

According to Smith (2020), the average lifespan of a dog is 12 years.

Both parenthetical and narrative citations are used to give credit to the source of information and to allow readers to locate the source if they want to learn more. Using a parenthetical or narrative citation will depend on your style guide and preference.

In LaTeX/Overleaf

When using LaTeX/Overleaf, it will depend if you use BibTeX or BibLaTeX. If you’re using BibTeX, then the natbib package will be of help, which includes several commands for customizing citations, such as \citet* for in-text citations and \citep* for citations without parentheses.

In BibLaTeX \parencite* is an already built-in option for appropriate customizations.

In Pandoc, Quarto, or R Markdown

It is straightforward with Pandoc; add your citation key without brackets, i.e., @citationkey if you use a narrative citation, and the in-text version with brackets, i.e., [@citationkey].

Announcing CiteDrive 3.0: keep track of your bibliographies, references, and citations on Overleaf and RStudio

Dec 5, 2022

CiteDrive 3.0 is out now, and it’s better than ever! We’ve made many improvements, including a better design, more focus on reference management with BibTeX, and better performance. If you’re an Overleaf or RStudio user, be sure to check it out.

Better Bib[La]TeX Overleaf workflow

CiteDrive has better integration with Overleaf and BibLaTeX support. It’s quick and easy to keep your references well organized, but unlike other modern reference management software, we don’t consider BibTeX an afterthought. References can be added and edited with our BibTeX editor, which offers freedom in terms of fields and types. We are here for you whether you use BibTeX, BibLaTex, jurabib, or JBibTEX.

New user interface and dark mode

The next update significantly enhances the user experience based on our users’ comments and numerous drafts and prototypes we have been developing for months. Make sure to check out dark mode, too!

Reference, bibliography, and citation management in RStudio (Posit) in Quarto and R Markdown.

RStudio joins the party and is also compatible with the 3.0 update–adding BibTeX-first referencing to Quarto and R Markdown.

CiteDrive allows you to store your references in a different location from your Quarto/R Markdown process. With our RStudio integration, you may wholly and instantly automatically update the status of your bibliography with the Quarto/R Markdown project at any moment - just as with Overleaf.