Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the block editor.
Citations introduces a new menu item to the rich text formatting toolbar. Users can highlight the text they want to cite, click ‘Cite’ in the toolbar, and then define the source in the pop-up by inputting the source information into the fields provided.
The Citations plugin includes one Bibliography block, which will be automatically populated with all the sources of the in-text citations added in the content. Citations are linked to the corresponding source inside the Bibliography block. The block can be positioned anywhere in the document, although readers likely expect it at the bottom.
Users can edit the citations and the sources in the Bibliography block by clicking on them.
What’s the difference between citations and WordPress’ core Footnotes block? Although both are used in academic and scholarly writing to provide references and additional information about sources used in a document, there are a few key differences.
Citations credit the original source of the information with all the source details in the bibliography at the end of the document. Footnotes are more flexible in that they can include additional context or comments at the bottom of the document, to keep the text from becoming too cluttered with explanatory notes. They may also be used to source citations with the author, title, and publication details, but do not always follow the bibliography format.
The Citations plugin also includes a pattern that will insert some Lorem Ipsum paragraphs with citations and a sample bibliography with sources at the bottom. This gives users an idea of how the plugin can be used to structure a document for citing sources, if they are just getting started. Users can search for “Citations Demo” in the pattern search bar to find it.
Download the plugin for free from WordPress.org, or give it a test drive using WordPress Playground.
When I played with this in the WordPress Playground example, I could not edit the citations from the Bibliography block (as noted in the line below the 2nd screenshot above) and clicking on the footnote number didn’t work to bring in the pop-up editor either.
Only clicking on the selected text in the body text block brought back the pop-up editor, which is a very limited pop-up that could be harder to navigate for longer citations.
No formatting tools are available to that tiny editor, which makes this of limited use if the citation format you’re following requires any specific text styles – italics, smallcaps, etc. I suppose you could copy and paste in citations, but editing them looks more cumbersome than I’d hoped from this writeup.