Scholar Sidekick

Scholar Sidekick is a fast, deterministic citation resolver, formatter, exporter, and verifier for researchers, clinicians, students, librarians, and AI agents.

Paste any scholarly identifier - DOI, PMID, PMCID, ISBN, ISSN, arXiv ID, ADS bibcode, or a WHO IRIS URL - and Scholar Sidekick fetches the bibliographic record from authoritative sources (Crossref, PubMed, arXiv, Open Library, ADS, DataCite), normalises the metadata, and renders a clean citation in your chosen style.

Five built-in styles - Vancouver, AMA, APA, IEEE, and CSE - are tuned for accuracy and speed. Beyond those, the full Citation Style Language (CSL) catalogue of 10,000+ styles is available, including journal-specific dependent styles that resolve to their parent style automatically.

Outputs travel anywhere your workflow needs:

• Plain text, HTML, and Markdown for direct paste • RIS, BibTeX, CSL-JSON, and EndNote XML for reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, JabRef, Citavi) • CSV for spreadsheets

Trust and integrity tools - purpose-built for the age of AI-generated text:

• Citation verifier - cross-checks the claimed title, author, and year against the paper at the resolved DOI/PMID/arXiv ID. Catches the dominant fabrication pattern (real identifier + invented title) that plain DOI resolution misses. • Retraction checker - Crossref + Retraction Watch with status, reason, and date. • Open-access checker - Unpaywall lookup surfaces the best legal free copy when one exists.

Scholar Sidekick exposes a public REST API with a documented OpenAPI spec, rate-limited tiers, and deterministic response headers (request ID, cache state, style provenance, fallback warnings).

It also ships across the surfaces researchers work in:

• Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge - right-click any selection to cite, check retraction, check open access, or verify; one toggle bundles retraction + OA into the cite flow. • Obsidian plugin - replace an identifier at the cursor, insert from a searchable 10,000-style modal, export a whole note to BibTeX or RIS. • Open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server - AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can resolve, format, export, verify, and check retraction/open-access status natively. • Zotero plugin - verify citations before adding them to your library. • Command-line client.

Engineered as boring, correct citation infrastructure: allowlisted outbound fetches, two-tier caching (in-memory LRU + persistent KV), SSRF protection, structured logs + Sentry, and 99% line / 99% branch test coverage in CI. Deployed on Vercel.

Use cases:

• Drop a DOI into a paper draft and get a perfectly formatted reference • Bulk-export a PubMed reading list to RIS for Zotero • Verify an AI-generated bibliography before submission, catching fabricated citations • Screen a reference list for retracted papers • Let an AI agent resolve, format, and verify citations via MCP

Free on the web, with paid API tiers for higher volume.