Citation & Reference Manager for Overleaf with CiteDrive

At last, focus on authoring your paper instead of worrying about keeping your references and citations in sync. Thanks to the seamless integration between CiteDrive and Overleaf, you can now effortlessly add in-text citations to your paper without ever leaving your Overleaf project.

Getting started

Step 1: Create a project at CiteDrive and collect and organize your references.

When you sign in to CiteDrive, you can create a new project. For example, we could create a Bioinformatics project within CiteDrive, and then you can proceed to include references in your new project. Here’s an example of what your project may look like:

CiteDrive simplifies the process of adding bibliographic references to your Overleaf project. You can add as many references as you need and organize them however you like. CiteDrive provides multiple ways to add references, including hand-adding BibTeX entries, importing a *.bib file, using the search engine, utilizing the ISBN resolver, or installing the CiteDrive browser extension to directly cite papers or websites from your web browser. The choice is yours!

Step 2: Connect your CiteDrive project with Overleaf.

To link your CiteDrive project with an Overleaf project, simply click on the .bib button located in the upper right corner of your CiteDrive project page.

Copy the link to Overleaf to connect both apps through our dynamic .bib file.

Now, returning to Overleaf. Click the New File icon and select From External URL.

Paste the CiteDrive link into the text field labeled URL to fetch the file from.

To incorporate your bibliography.bib into your LaTeX document, simply click on the “Create” button and use \bibliography{bibliography}. That’s all there is to it! If you want to ensure that you have the latest version of your CiteDrive .bib file, you can refresh the imported file in Overleaf.

About Overleaf

Overleaf empowers teams of students and researchers to collaboratively write papers from anywhere in an easy-to-use, online LaTeX editor. With the addition of one of many available packages– such as BibTeX– Overleaf can also automatically generate in-text citations and bibliographies based on reference keys pulled from a flat BibTeX database file. When combined with CiteDrive and the CiteDrive Companion browser add-on, manually maintaining your BibTeX database as well as the guesswork of writing in-text citation snippets becomes a thing of the past. Focus on the work at hand and Cite The Way You Write.

About CiteDrive

CiteDrive was born out of a common refrain among our team, friends, and fellow academics that managing references felt so clunky compared with today’s consumer-grade tools and collaborative editors. Worse yet, there weren’t really any good solutions that were truly built to serve those authoring LaTeX instead of it merely being an afterthought.

After a couple of initial failed experiments, the first end-to-end experience focusing on Overleaf users was piloted in fall 2021 and quickly evolved into the platform as it exists today.

CiteDrive continues to relentlessly focus on refining and simplifying the experience of discovering references and citing as you write. After a couple of initial failed experiments, the first end-to-end experience focusing on Overleaf users was piloted in fall 2021 and quickly evolved into the platform as it exists today.

Where can I read more Overleaf + Citedrive?

• Check out our featured guest post on the Overleaf blog
• Read our most recent release announcement
• Follow the quick start guide in the docs

Features:

In-text citations, made dead simple.

With the help of the CiteDrive Companion browser add-on, inserting in-text citations to your Overleaf paper is a snap. Simply place your cursor within the editor, click the “insert citation” button along the top of the screen, select the reference of interest and confirm.

Collect references from anywhere

CiteDrive Companion improves life outside the editor as well by empowering you to quickly collect references where you find them. Whether you prefer to use PubMed, Google Scholar or other resources for discovering references, you can quickly generate, customize and add BibTeX entries to your project and immediately make them available for citation in your Overleaf paper.

Natively Bib[La]TeX - not an afterthought.

Most reference managers with BibTeX / BibLaTeX support do so as a conversion or translation and you lose out on much of the benefit and rich control offered by handcrafting your references. Because CiteDrive is built natively for Bib[La]TeX, you maintain full control and can leverage custom fields as you please. You shouldn’t be forced to choose between ease and utility.

Collaborative, just like Overleaf

We believe collaborative writing and collaborative reference management go hand-in-hand. Add collaborators to your CiteDrive project just as you would with your Overleaf paper so collecting references can be a team effort.