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RefCopy

What Is RefCopy?

RefCopy is a free browser extension that sits beside the journal article you’re reading and turns it into a citation. Open the side panel on an article page and RefCopy reads the paper’s DOI, builds a formatted reference in the style you choose, and lays out the publication details so you can copy any of them with one click. There’s no account to create and nothing to set up before you start — your settings stay on your own device.

What it does for you

  • Generate a formatted reference in any of more than 10,000 styles — APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, and thousands of journal-specific formats.
  • Copy the title, authors, journal, date, DOI, ISSN, and other details, one field at a time.
  • See an article’s open-access status, citation counts, license, and reference list without leaving the page.
  • Work faster in Google Scholar, with highlighted search terms and one-click citation buttons on every result.

What it’s best for

RefCopy is made for the moment you’re reading a paper and need its citation now — for an essay, a report, a set of slides, or a quick lookup. It stays deliberately lightweight so it’s there when you need it and out of the way when you don’t.

It isn’t a full reference manager. If you’re assembling a thesis, a dissertation, or a large bibliography you’ll revise over months, Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote will serve you better. RefCopy also reads journal articles that have a DOI, so it can’t cite websites or other resources that don’t have one.

Online or in your browser

Prefer not to install anything? The online version at refcopy.com runs the same lookup from a DOI you paste in — useful on a shared or locked-down computer. The extension adds the part that saves the most time: it finds the DOI for you while you read.

Next: Install RefCopy, then follow the Quick start.