Citations & bibliography

Adding a citation in most LaTeX workflows means: find the paper, export BibTeX, clean it up, paste it into the .bib, invent a key, and finally type the \cite. Oleafly collapses all of that into one dialog.

Add citation

Open it from the quote button in the editor toolbar or run Add citation from the ⌘K command palette. Then paste or type any of:

• A DOI like 10.1145/3592979: fetched directly from doi.org.
• An arXiv id like 1706.03762: fetched from arXiv.
• A URL containing either of the above.
• A paper title: searches Crossref and shows a list of matches with title, authors, year, and venue; pick the right one.

Click Look up, review the fetched BibTeX in the preview, and hit Add to .bib and cite. Oleafly then does three things at once:

1. Appends the entry to your project’s .bib, with a clean, auto-generated citation key.
2. Deduplicates by DOI: if the paper is already in your bibliography under any key, no duplicate is created and the existing key is reused.
3. Inserts \cite{key} at your cursor and confirms with a toast.

Which .bib file it uses

Oleafly targets the bibliography your document actually loads: the file named in \bibliography{} or \addbibresource{}. If neither exists, it uses the project’s first .bib, and if the project has none at all, it creates references.bib. You never have to think about it, but the behavior is predictable when you do.

Autocomplete from your .bib

Once entries exist, typing inside \cite{ (and variants like \citep, \citet, \parencite, \textcite) completes citation keys from every .bib in the project, parsed automatically when the project opens. Details in Autocomplete.

Navigating your citations

Citations plug into code intelligence like everything else:

• F12 or ⌘-click on a \cite key jumps to the entry in the .bib.
• ⇧F12 lists every place a paper is cited.
• F2 renames a citation key across the whole project, .bib included.
• Hover a key to see what it points to; an unresolved key is flagged before the compiler ever complains.

And before you submit, Preflight catches undefined citations, duplicate labels, and duplicate bibliography entries (two keys sharing one DOI).

Privacy and offline behavior

A lookup sends exactly one thing over the network: the identifier or title you typed, to doi.org, arXiv, or Crossref. Nothing else about your document leaves your machine. With Offline mode on, lookups are blocked entirely; autocomplete from your existing .bib keeps working, since it never needed the network in the first place.