The Citation Tracking Nightmare That Made Me Build My Own Tool

When we were reviewing the full text of articles for my review, there were many passages we wanted to include. Important information we needed to paraphrase and cite.

So I copied and pasted these phrases into our draft. Simple enough, right?

Wrong.

The Problem: Keeping Track

Here's the problem: I always had to keep track of which article each piece of text came from.

You copy a passage about treatment outcomes. You paste it into your draft. Now you need to know: which paper was that from? Because when you write your final version, you need to cite it correctly.

Maybe you add a note next to it: "(Smith et al. 2023)". Maybe you keep a separate document mapping excerpts to sources. Maybe you just try to remember and hope for the best. (Not really - nobody actually does this. It would never work. But honestly, sometimes it feels like that's what you're doing.)

It's Easy. Until It's Not.

Here's the thing: doing this for one citation is very easy. It's simple. You copy, you paste, you note the source. Done.

The problem is volume.

When you have to do this for hundreds of citations, it becomes a nightmare. Each individual task is trivial. But the accumulation of all these trivial tasks is what makes it unbearable.

The Order Problem

And if I changed the order, or moved things around, I had to update the citations manually. Every. Single. Time.

You're writing a review article. You organize your thoughts. You realize that paragraph A should come after paragraph B. So you cut and paste.

But now the citation that was next to paragraph A is in the wrong place. Or you accidentally left it behind. Or you moved the citation but forgot which excerpt it belonged to.

And then what do you do? You hit Command+Z. Or Control+Z. You hit it a few times to undo everything you just did. Then you redo the same thing, this time properly, making sure to move the citation with the excerpt.

It drives you crazy. Reorganizing your draft shouldn't mean redoing all your citation work. But that's exactly what happens with the copy-paste approach.

It Breaks Your Focus

This is maybe the most frustrating part.

When you're writing your draft, you're in a certain headspace. You're thinking about the science. You're thinking about all the facts from the literature. You're trying to organize your ideas, structure your argument, make sense of everything you've read.

And then every few minutes, you have to stop. Copy the excerpt. Paste it. Find the citation. Copy that too. Paste it next to the excerpt. Make sure they're linked. Think about how to organize the text.

This breaks your focus. It takes you out of scientific thinking and into administrative work. And then you have to refocus. Get back into the flow. Remember what you were thinking about.

That's another way you lose time. Not just the time spent copying and pasting, but the time spent getting back into the zone after each interruption.

I Knew Software Could Fix This

Here's what made it even more frustrating: I knew that programmatically, this would be very easy.

You just link the text to its original source once, and it stays linked no matter where you move it. The connection between excerpt and citation is permanent. Move the paragraph anywhere in your document - the citation moves with it.

This isn't complicated computer science. Any basic database can maintain relationships between objects. But no tool I could find did this for academic writing.

Reliability at What Cost?

Yes, with enough effort, you can make the manual approach work. You can double-check everything. You can verify every citation. You can be confident that your final document is accurate.

But at what cost?

My nerves. That's the cost. Frustration. The feeling that instead of writing the text - which is what I should have been doing - I was moving citations around. Doing work that a machine could do. Work that adds no intellectual value.

And after going through that, you don't want to do it again. You don't want to write another publication. Not because the science is hard, but because the administrative burden is so draining.

This Work Is Free. It Should Be Easier.

When you write a scientific publication, you usually do it on your own free time. You do it for free. You do it for humanity, for the advancement of knowledge. That's the spirit of science.

I'm not going to argue about whether scientific work should be unpaid. That's a different conversation.

But if you're giving your time freely, the least the tools can do is make it bearable. You should be able to focus on what actually matters in science - the thinking, the analysis, the writing. Not on shuffling citations around.

You should be able to finish your work and still have energy left. Maybe even relax a little. Not feel drained from administrative tasks that contribute nothing to the science itself.

So I Fixed It

When I built LitRevs, excerpt-citation linking was a core feature.

Save a passage from a paper, and it stays connected to its citation forever. Move it around your document - the citation follows. Reorganize your entire draft - every excerpt still knows where it came from.

No manual tracking. No breaking your focus every few minutes. No cost to your nerves.

If This Sounds Familiar

If you've ever lost track of which excerpt came from which paper, or had your focus broken by citation management, or reorganized your draft only to realize your citations were now wrong, or felt drained by work that added no intellectual value - you're not alone.

This was one of the most frustrating parts of writing my review article. It's one of the main reasons I built LitRevs.