Extract Citations and References From PDF

LumaCite reads an academic PDF, finds the bibliography or references section, splits it into individual citation rows, detects identifiers, checks citation quality, and prepares clean export files. It is built for papers, theses, systematic reviews, manuscript checks, and bibliography cleanup.

It works best with research PDFs that contain selectable text and a recognizable references section. If a PDF is scanned, image-only, heavily multi-column, or missing a clear bibliography heading, LumaCite will warn you and may ask for review instead of pretending the output is perfect.

Yes. After extraction, you can copy or download selected references as BibTeX or BibLaTeX for LaTeX, Overleaf, Zotero, JabRef, and academic writing workflows. If the extracted list looks unsafe, LumaCite blocks clean export and leaves the audit report available.

Yes. LumaCite can export RIS for reference managers, plus EndNote XML, CSL-JSON, CSV, Markdown, and Word bibliography text. This makes it useful when you need to move references from a PDF into Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, Overleaf, Word, or Google Docs.

Yes. The extractor scans each row for DOI, PMID, PMCID, arXiv ID, ISBN, ISSN, and URL signals. Strong identifiers make metadata lookup safer because the app can verify a candidate against trusted citation evidence instead of guessing from title text alone.

Auto-fetch tries to fill missing citation data only when the candidate metadata matches the extracted row. It checks title similarity, author overlap, year, source, and trusted identifiers. If a row looks like funding text, acknowledgements, grant numbers, or a weak match, LumaCite rejects it and explains why.

Verified means the row has strong citation evidence and no blocking conflicts. Check details means it looks like a usable reference but needs review before export. Cannot verify means the row may be incomplete, mismatched, weakly parsed, or not a real reference.

Clean export is blocked when count checks, row boundaries, identifiers, metadata, or quality signals suggest the bibliography may be incomplete, merged, over-split, or unsafe to import directly. You can still download the audit report to see what failed and decide what to fix.

Yes. The quality report flags possible duplicate references, missing identifiers, missing fields, suspicious rows, metadata conflicts, and references that should be checked before import. The goal is to prevent broken citations from entering your library.

Yes. Students, academics, librarians, systematic review teams, and industry scientists can use LumaCite to extract bibliography data from papers, review citation quality, and export references into screening, writing, or reference-management tools.

Yes. If the PDF is hard to parse, paste a bibliography or references section directly. LumaCite will still split entries, detect DOI and PMID identifiers, run quality checks, and prepare export files.

LumaCite is a place for different citation work, including extraction from PDFs, pasted reference text cleanup, reference style conversion, identifier review, and export preparation. You can use LumaCite tools and platform features as standalone citation workflow tools, or use them alongside Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, Overleaf, Word, Google Docs, and other reference managers. LumaCite also has a dedicated online citation management app that is currently in beta and available by invitation only.