Citations & references

A citation in Skriptr is a link to a specific work in your library, not just text on the page. Because it’s a link, your bibliography builds itself, and changing citation style rewrites every citation at once.

Which citation styles are supported?

Three, and you pick one per document:

APA 7 and Chicago are author-date styles. IEEE numbers citations in the order they first appear. You choose the style in the Export panel or in Editor Settings, and both write the same setting, so they can’t disagree with each other.

Switching is safe whenever. Because citations are links rather than typed text, changing the style re-renders all of them, in the text and in the bibliography. Your supervisor asking for Chicago in week eleven is a two-click problem.

How do citations stay linked to sources?

When you cite a work from your library, Skriptr records which source you cited and, where it knows it, which page. That link is what the rest is built on:

• Your bibliography is generated from what you actually cited, so it can’t drift out of step with the document.
• A citation can point at a page rather than a whole PDF, so a reader, and you six weeks later, can check the claim against the passage it came from.
• Renaming or reorganising a source doesn’t break anything that cites it.

When the agent cites something for you, the same rule applies: it cites from your library, and you can follow the citation back to the source to see what it was reading. That’s the check worth doing, and it’s the reason the link matters more than the formatting.

What if a reference is incomplete?

Skriptr works out reference details automatically where it can, but not every PDF gives up its metadata, and imported entries are only as complete as the file they came from.

Each style demands different fields, so completeness is judged against the style you’ve chosen. In the References list, an entry missing something your style requires is flagged in red with a line naming exactly what’s missing ("Missing for APA 7", and the fields). Entries missing something merely recommended are flagged more gently.

Fix them by opening the entry and filling the fields in. Do it before you export rather than after: an entry that’s incomplete in the app is incomplete in your exported bibliography too.

Two habits keep this painless. Add reference details when you add the source rather than at the end, and re-check the References list after switching style, since a new style may want a field the old one didn’t.

Where do I go next?

• Sources & your library. Where citable works come from.
• Export. How the bibliography comes out.

Still stuck?

If a citation isn’t rendering the way this page describes, or a style is producing output you know to be wrong, send us the details: which style, which source, and what you expected.