The followingtools can help you quickly assemble acitation from limited information. They generate a complete formattedreference from a few basic details, but their output should always be checked for accuracy.
OABOT, a tool that finds open-access links for citations
Web2Cit: An automatic citation generator for web sources, meant to complement citation results by Citoid for which no validtranslators exist. Web2Cit translators are community controlled. It runsits own server on toolforge.
Thevisual editor helps users format, insert, and edit sources by simply providing a DOI, URL, ISBN etc., seeWP:REFVISUAL.
The citation generation tool of the Visual Editor (WP:REFVISUAL) can also be used when editing the article source, for users who have enabled the2017 wikitext editor in their preferences.
Template:Ref info, which can aid evaluating what kind of citation style was used to write the article
Citation Bot (more info) – Partial citations must either contain a DOI, PMID, PMC, ISBN,S2CID or enough fields to be uniquely found; the bot will also fix formatting errors
Find sources – provides links to customized searches for reliable sources in news newspapers books scholar JSTOR free images and the like. Points to a variety of templates for use in talk pages, on theAfD page etc., and for a variety of types of articles and situations.
RefScript: A bookmarklet that generates references with a single click. Works with a few news websites (BBC, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Canada, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Times of India, Financial Times, The Economist, Business Week, Ars Technica, TG Daily) and it can learn any other newspaper or website.
WebRef: A bookmarklet automating the filling of the{{cite web}} template.
User:Ark25/RefScript, a JavaScript bookmarklet – creates references in one click, works for many newspapers
User:V111P/js/WebRef, a script or bookmarklet automating the filling of the{{cite web}} template. You use the script on the page you want to cite.
Desktop software
Wikicite is a free program that helps editors to create citations for their Wikipedia contributions usingcitation templates. It is written inVisual Basic .NET, making it suitable only for users with the.NET Framework installed on Windows, or, for other platforms, theMono alternative framework. Wikicite and its source code is freely available; see thedeveloper's page for further details.
Reference management software
Reference management software can output formatted citations in several styles, including Wikipedia citation templates.
Reference Organizer presents all references in graphical user interface, where you can choose whether the references should be defined in the body of article or in the reference list template(s) (list-defined format). You can also sort the references in various ways (and optionally keep the sort order), and rename the references.
RefTooltip sets the tooltip for references to the text of the reference.
ReviewSourceCheck (different versions for different preferences) flags 16 types of errors in the references and/or notes, when using Harv templates.
Sources Formats names of newspapers within citation templates
User:BrandonXLF/Autoref replaces the reference button in the editing toolbar in the 2010 wikitext editor with a button that allows the use of Citoid to insert an auto generated reference
User:BrandonXLF/Citoid generates a reference using the Citoid server. Designed for being used inside user scripts.
user:js/ajaxPreview adds a preview button that will show references when editing a section
User:Salix alba/Citoid Generates citation templates using the Citoid server. Standalone javascript which can be used outside of Visual Editor.
Tools to improve existing citations
Citation expander automatically adds missing data to citations using citation templates, and makes corrections to their formatting
User:Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences This script detects and displays references with duplicate URLs. It also calculates how similar the visible text of those references is as a percentage.
URL Extractor For Web Pages and Text can identify Web citations with theexact same URL but otherwise possibly different. Most differences are not significant, but sometimes different page numbers from the same URL are cited. Occasionally references to the same Web page might be followed by different non-significant tracking parameters (?utm ...,#ixzz...), and will not be listed as duplicates.
Step 1: click "Enter URL", enter (paste) the URL of the Wikipedia article and click "Load",
Optional: Tick the radio button "Do not show", tick the box at the beginning of its line, and enter (paste) into the boxweb.archive.org,wikipedia,wikimedia,wikiquote,wikidata,worldcat
Step 3: Click Extract.
Then the duplicates will be listed, and must be manually merged. There will often be false positives;web.archive.org URLs, in particular, are a nuisance as they contain the original URLs, which show as duplicates. The optional part of Step 2 eliminates the archive URLs, but unfortunately the list of duplicates includes the archived pages. The wiki* URLs are less of a problem as they can just be ignored.
Libraries for developers
User:Richiez wrotetools to automatically handle citations for a whole article at a time. These were marked asobsolete in 2016. They convert occurrences of {{pmid|XXXXXXXX}} (PubMed) or {{isbn|XXXXXXXXXX}} to properly formatted footnote or Harvard-style references. Written inRuby and requires a working installation with basic libraries.
