About this plugin
TheLaTeXLab – Citations & Bibliography is a WordPress citation plugin and bibliography plugin for academic bloggers, PhD students, postdocs, and research labs. Easily add citations and a bibliography in your WordPress website: paste a DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN, or arXiv ID and get a clean in-text citation and automatically generate a bibliography in APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver, and other citation styles.
Perfect for academic blogs, university websites, research group websites, online journals, and personal publication pages.
A modern, actively maintained citation tool, it works as an up-to-date citation and BibTeX plugin for WordPress. It runs in both the block editor (Gutenberg) and the Classic Editor, and it does not lock your content: deactivate the plugin and your in-text citations stay readable as plain text. If you have been looking for an easy way to cite research papers and sources in WordPress, or to turn a DOI into a citation and bibliography, this is the plugin for it.
Full documentation and a step-by-step guide on how to use the plugin: TheLaTeXLab – Citations & Bibliography documentation and how-to guide.
Insert citations from identifiers
- DOI to BibTeX: paste a DOI, get the verified record from CrossRef.
- PubMed to BibTeX: paste a PubMed ID (PMID) or PMC ID.
- ISBN to BibTeX: paste an ISBN-10 or ISBN-13.
- arXiv to BibTeX: paste an arXiv ID.
- Paste a URL from doi.org, arxiv.org, PubMed, or a publisher page and the plugin extracts and verifies the identifier. A citation is produced only when it can be confidently verified against the source, never guessed.
- Import existing libraries: BibTeX (.bib) and RIS (.ris) upload.
Auto-format a bibliography
Eight citation styles: APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 (author-date), Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, Nature, AMA. Selectable per post, with a site-wide default.
Block editor and Classic Editor, both
An “Insert Citation” block for Gutenberg and a toolbar button for the Classic Editor, sharing the same search-or-paste modal.
Publications page mode
A publications list block and the [thelatexlab_publications] shortcode render your references as a sortable, filterable list. Ideal for a researcher’s personal site.
Robust by design
- Citations are stored as portable JSON. Deactivate the plugin and in-text citations stay readable.
- Resolved metadata is cached for 30 days.
- Compatible with PHP 7.4+ and WordPress 6.0+.
- Built and designed for researchers who need fast, accurate academic citations in WordPress.
TheLaTeXLab – Professional Word to LaTeX & PDF to LaTeX Conversion
This plugin is built by TheLaTeXLab, a professional LaTeX typesetting service for researchers, PhD students, and academics. Beyond WordPress citations, we help authors get their manuscripts submission-ready: Word to LaTeX, PDF to LaTeX, and thesis formatting in LaTeX to exact journal and university templates.
External services
This plugin resolves identifiers and parses or converts reference files using TheLaTeXLab’s citation API, a service operated by TheLaTeXLab. It is required for the lookup, import, and export features. Citation formatting (the bibliography you see on the page) runs locally on your server and does not use the API.
What is sent, and when:
- When you resolve an identifier or URL (DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN, arXiv ID, PMC ID, or a URL), that identifier or URL is sent to the API to fetch the bibliographic record.
- When you import a reference file (.bib,.ris,.enw,.nbib), the contents of that file are sent to the API to be parsed into citation records.
- When you edit a reference or export to RIS, the affected reference data is sent to the API to regenerate BibTeX or RIS.
- Each request includes your site URL (for diagnostics and abuse prevention). No personal data, post content, or visitor data is sent.
- Optional email updates: only if you tick the “Get plugin updates by email” option on the plugin’s welcome screen and submit it, your email address and site URL are sent to the service and stored so TheLaTeXLab can email you occasional plugin updates. This is entirely optional, off unless you choose it, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Nothing is sent when a page with a bibliography is viewed by your readers; rendering is local.
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The API base URL is configurable in the plugin settings, so you can point it at your own deployment if you prefer.
Credits
Bibliography formatting uses citeproc-php by Sebastian Boettger (MIT license). The bundled citation style (CSL) files come from the official Citation Style Language styles project (CC-BY-SA); the per-style author attribution is retained inside each file. One file (Chicago) has a single compatibility edit to its page-range-format value so it works with the bundled formatter.