CiteDrive—Easy Reference Management for Overleaf

Guest blog post by Gareth Bilaney, co-founder of CiteDrive, a cloud-based platform for managing references and citations. This aricle was was first published on October 12, 2021 and updated on January 5, 2022 to include new CiteDrive features.

January 5, 2022 update—The CiteDrive team are excited to announce a host of enhancements to the Overleaf and CiteDrive integration—based on amazing feedback from users. Some of the most significant changes include the new in-editor experience, doubling-down on being BibTeX-native and making improvements to further streamline reference gathering.

Are you looking for a straightforward way to collect and manage references for your Overleaf projects, one that goes a step beyond a static references.bib? CiteDrive is a cloud-based platform for managing references and citations in native BibTeX format, which also enables seamless collaboration. This post introduces CiteDrive using 4 short video clips, without audio, together with a 3-minute demonstration of CiteDrive with accompanying audio narrative.

Designed from the ground up to be relentlessly focused on being “nothing more than a tool for referencing”, CiteDrive provides the ability to collect and manage references in a matter of a couple of clicks. Whether you choose to use the inline search capability:

… or use the CiteDrive Companion browser add-on to directly add references from Google Scholar, Pubmed, or others:

… you’ll be able to take advantage of the same focused workflow. New in the January 2022 release, you can now review and modify the generated BibTeX snippet before saving the new reference to your project.

Better yet, because CiteDrive allows you to host an auto-updating “references.bib” file for your project, integrating your CiteDrive and Overleaf projects together is a snap. Simply click Export and copy your unique link. Within Overleaf, click the upload icon in your project and select “From External URL”. Paste the unique URL and name the file “references.bib” or similar.

Newly added for January 2022: Once you’ve linked your Overleaf project to your hosted “references.bib” file, adding in-text citations to your paper is a breeze thanks to the new CiteDrive Companion in-editor experience. Simply click the Insert Citation button at the top of the Overleaf screen and select the reference(s) of interest from the list. Click the In-text citation button and the in-text citation will be automatically inserted into the editor at the cursor position.

Voilà! Fully managed references and auto-generated citations for your Overleaf project.

A quick video tutorial on CiteDrive

For more complete videos and guides on using CiteDrive and Overleaf together, head over to the CiteDrive+Overleaf Guide. And don’t forget to create your free account at CiteDrive.com!!