Literature Citations

A WordPress plugin for managing and displaying academic-style citations, bibliographies, and footnotes on posts.

Features

• Store citations (articles, books, chapters, conference papers, theses, websites, video, film, podcasts, software, and more) in a dedicated database table
• Insert in-text citation markers with the [cite] shortcode
• Auto-generate a "References" footnotes section at the end of each post
• Generate a full bibliography with the [bibliography] shortcode
• Format citations in APA, MLA, or Chicago style
• Track which posts cite which sources, and show back-links from each bibliography entry to the posts that used it

Shortcodes

[cite]

Inserts an in-text citation marker as a superscript link.

[cite key="smith2023"]
[cite key="smith2023" text="Smith et al."]
[cite key="smith2023" page="42"]
[cite key="smith2023" pages="42-45"]
[cite id="17"]

Citations are numbered per-post in order of first use. Reusing the same citation later in the same post reuses its original number.

[bibliography]

Renders the full list of citations as a formatted, ordered list.

[bibliography]
[bibliography style="mla" orderby="year" order="DESC"]
[bibliography type="book"]
[bibliography show_usage="no"]

[footnotes]

Manually places the footnotes/references block. If omitted, footnotes are automatically appended to the end of post content — use this shortcode only if you want to control where the references list appears instead.

"Cited In" Back-Links

Each bibliography entry can show which published posts have cited it, rendered as superscript, bracketed reference links (e.g. Cited in: [1] [2] [3]), matching the visual style of the in-text [cite] markers. Hovering a number shows the linked post's title.

• Only published posts are included (drafts and private posts are excluded).
• Links are pulled from the plugin's internal usage-tracking table, so no extra configuration is needed.
• Disable this per-shortcode-call with show_usage="no" if you don't want it on a particular bibliography.

Styling hooks

Back-link markup uses the following CSS classes, which you can style in your theme or in the plugin's frontend stylesheet:

.citation-cited-in {
    /* wrapper around the whole "Cited in: [1] [2] [3]" block */
}

.citation-backlink-ref {
    /* each individual superscript [n] */
}

.citation-backlink {
    /* the <a> link itself */
}

Database

The plugin creates two tables on activation:

• {prefix}_literature_citations — stores citation metadata (authors, title, publication, year, DOI, etc.)
• {prefix}_citation_usage — tracks which posts cite which citations, and in what order

Requirements

• WordPress (uses $wpdb, dbDelta, shortcode API, and the_content filter)
• PHP with standard WordPress sanitization functions available

Notes

• Citation types are defined in Citation_DB::get_citation_types() and can be extended there.
• All output is escaped via WordPress's esc_html, esc_url, and esc_attr functions.