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Writing with your library

Citation keys

Every paper has a BibTeX citation key, such as Hinton2012-ab. Imported keys are kept, new ones are made in Paperpile's style, and a key never changes once given, so your LaTeX keeps compiling. Tap the key in a paper's details to copy it.

Copying a citation

Cite, in a paper's details, copies it formatted as a short post line, APA, Markdown, a LaTeX \cite{…}, or a BibTeX entry.

Below those come journal styles from the Citation Style Language, the same 10,000+ styles Zotero and Mendeley use. The American Physical Society style is there to start. Another journal's style… searches all of them by name, for example Physical Review D, JCAP or Nature; the ones you use most recently stay in the menu. A style is fetched from the CSL project the first time and kept in your browser. When pasted into a document, the citation keeps its italics and bold.

To copy a whole reference list, open a folder or search, then choose Copy papers in view as a reference list in the command palette. It uses the journal style you used last.

The library as BibTeX

lightkone/library.bib in your storage is rewritten on every save, with the whole library. The download button at the top exports the papers in the current view as a .bib, so open a folder or search first to export part of the library.

A folder's .bib in GitHub, for Overleaf

Overleaf can pull a .bib from a GitHub repository. Lightkone keeps one up to date:

  1. Make a GitHub token with Contents: read and write on the repository (see Private GitHub repository), and add it under Settings → BibTeX sync to GitHub. If your library itself lives on GitHub and that token can reach the repository, it is used when this one is empty.
  2. Open a folder (or All papers) and press Sync .bib. Choose the repository and the file path, for example refs/thesis.bib.

From then on, whenever papers in that folder change, Lightkone rewrites the file with a commit. In Overleaf, link the file from GitHub.

Watch my manuscript

Watch my manuscript (side bar, Write) keeps a manuscript's .bib in step with what the manuscript actually cites. Point it at the GitHub repository and folder holding your .tex files. Lightkone reads every \cite{…}, writes a .bib with exactly those papers, and lists any keys your library doesn't have so you can add them. Entries already in the .bib for keys your library lacks are kept as they are. It checks again each time Lightkone opens.

Cite my draft

Cite my draft (side bar, Write) goes through a whole manuscript and finds the sentences that make a claim but cite nothing.

  1. Open your .tex, or paste a section, and press Find uncited claims. Lightkone reads the document's text only: the preamble, the abstract, headings, floats, comments and the bibliography are skipped, and an equation stays part of the sentence around it.
  2. It lists the sentences that read like claims from elsewhere ("has been shown", "previous studies", a measured number) and passes over those about your own work ("In this paper we", "as shown in Fig. 2"), each with its line in the source. Show every uncited sentence lists the rest too. With a Claude key, Ask Claude which need a citation reads every uncited sentence with the one before it and keeps those that need one, each with a short search to find the paper.
  3. Suggest papers on a sentence (or Find papers for all) looks in your library first, in the full texts of your PDFs, then on OpenAlex for published work you don't have. With a Claude key, each suggestion is checked against its passage or abstract and marked as backing the sentence, related or not, and the ones that back it are ticked.
  4. Cite puts \cite{…} into the sentence, just before its full stop. A ticked paper that is not in your library is added first, so it has a key. Undo takes it out again.
  5. Download gives the .tex back with only the citations added; nothing else in the source changes. Pick \cite, \citep, \citet, \autocite or \parencite. Download .bib gives the entries for every key the new .tex cites.

The draft, Claude's reading of it, the papers suggested and the citations chosen are kept in this browser and in your storage (lightkone/cite-draft.json; in a shared or read-only library, this browser only), so the panel can be closed and opened again, on this device or another, without asking Claude again.

Writing helpers

Writing helpers (side bar, Write) holds Cite my draft and two smaller tools:

Markdown · All docs as one text file · This page on GitHub