Feature Overview
Academic References is a full citation and reference management system for WordPress. This page summarizes what it does; later sections cover each area in detail.
Auto-cite from an identifier
Section titled “Auto-cite from an identifier”Paste an identifier and the plugin fetches the metadata for you. Supported lookup sources:
| Source | What you paste |
|---|---|
| DOI | A DOI (for example 10.1038/nphys1170) |
| PubMed | A PubMed ID (PMID) |
| ISBN | A book ISBN |
| URL | A web page or article URL |
| ORCID | An author ORCID iD |
| Crossref | Search or DOI lookup |
| OpenAlex | Work, author, venue, or institution lookup |
| Semantic Scholar | Paper, author, citation, and reference lookup |
URLs from arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv are recognized and routed to the right source automatically.
10,000+ citation styles
Section titled “10,000+ citation styles”Citations and bibliographies are formatted with the Citation Style Language (CSL). The bundled manifest lists over 10,000 styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, Nature, and thousands of journal-specific formats). Twelve popular styles ship with the plugin; any other style is fetched on demand from the official CSL styles repository. You can also upload your own CSL file.
Gutenberg blocks and shortcodes
Section titled “Gutenberg blocks and shortcodes”- Four blocks: Citation, Bibliography, Footnote, and Static Bibliography.
- Eleven shortcodes for the Classic Editor and page builders, including
[abt_citation],[abt_bibliography],[abt_footnote], and[abt_dashboard].
See Blocks and Shortcodes.
Reference library
Section titled “Reference library”- A References post type with an archive at
/references/. - Reference Categories and Reference Tags taxonomies.
- Collections for grouping references (including public and shared collections).
- Search, fuzzy search, sorting, and manual reordering.
Personal research tools
Section titled “Personal research tools”Signed-in users get a private layer on every reference:
- Favorites / stars to flag important works.
- Reading status (unread, reading, completed).
- Private notes that only the author can see.
Front-end submission and moderation
Section titled “Front-end submission and moderation”Let visitors or members submit references from the front end. Submissions can publish immediately or wait for approval, controlled per user role. Pending submissions appear under References > Pending References.
Import and export
Section titled “Import and export”Import and export references as BibTeX, RIS, or CSL-JSON. See Import & Export.
External integrations
Section titled “External integrations”Optional services you can enable under References > Settings > Integrations:
- OpenCitations - citation counts and metrics (no API key needed).
- Unpaywall - links to open-access versions of papers (needs an email).
- CORE - open-access aggregation (needs an API key).
- scite - Smart Citation badges.
- Webhooks - send reference events to Zapier, Slack, Discord, or any endpoint.
For developers
Section titled “For developers”- A REST API under the
abt/v1namespace. - Action and filter hooks for reference, collection, import, export, and template events.
- A theme template-override system.
- A custom fields API for adding your own reference metadata.
- A WP-CLI command (
wp abt demo) for demo data.
See the Developer Guide.