Capture every quote with its citation. Cite them in seconds when you write.
One keystroke turns any web selection into a saved, searchable quote — with the URL, page title, capture timestamp, and (for academic pages) the DOI and citation metadata. Then export to BibTeX, CSV, JSON, or Markdown — straight into Zotero, LaTeX, Excel, or Obsidian.
Reading literature is fast. Citing it is slow.
A typical PhD reads 200+ papers across the program — and ends up quoting maybe 60–80 sentences in the dissertation. The bottleneck isn't reading; it's the work between reading and citing.
The citation hunt
You copy a quote into Zotero, Obsidian, or a Word doc. Two tabs later, you've lost the URL — and now you're re-skimming a 30-page paper to find the line.
Five formats, none of them yours
You collect from PubMed, JSTOR, arXiv, Nature, blog posts. Each platform exports its own way. You spend more time wrangling formats than arguing your point.
Bookmarking the wrong unit
Pocket and Instapaper save articles. But you don't need the article three months later — you need the sentence on page 12 that nailed your argument.
Reference-list scramble
The night before submission you're cross-referencing DOIs, retyping author names, and fixing journal abbreviations. The committee finds two errors anyway.
The capture-to-citation loop
One keystroke for every selection. A private, searchable library. Four exports that drop into the tools you already write in.
Select & capture
Highlight a passage on any web page — arXiv, Nature, PubMed, a blog post. Press Ctrl + Shift + Q. Done.
Auto-enrichment
For academic pages, the DOI is detected automatically. Pro adds OpenAlex citation metadata — authors, year, journal, publication date.
Search anytime
Open the popup. Full-text search across every captured quote. Your library grows quietly while you read.
Export to where you write
Click BibTeX for Zotero/LaTeX, CSV for Excel, JSON for backup, Markdown for Obsidian. The file lands in your Downloads folder.
The trial is independent of payment
No card details, no checkout, no Stripe page during the trial. Install the extension, click a button inside the popup, and you have 7 days of full Pro access. Decide whether to subscribe at the end — not at the start.
Install the extension (free)
Get Research Quote Capture from the Chrome Web Store. Capture, browse, and search are free forever — no trial needed for those.
Click Start 7-day trial in the popup
Open the toolbar popup. The banner at the top has a Start 7-day trial button. One click. No card. No email. No Stripe page.
Use Pro for 7 days
BibTeX/CSV/JSON/Markdown export plus OpenAlex citation enrichment unlock immediately. The popup shows a countdown so you always know how many days are left.
Decide on day 7
If Pro saved you time, subscribe (monthly or annual — link below). If not, the extension stays free for capture/browse/search. Nothing auto-charges because nothing was ever entered.
Four exports — one for every stage of writing
A grad student exports JSON for backup once a month. CSV when their advisor asks "are you reading recent enough work?" Markdown when they sit down to draft the literature review. BibTeX when they're three days from submission and the reference list needs to compile.
Each quote becomes a @article (with DOI) or @misc (URL-only) entry. The selection text rides in the note field. Citation keys follow lastnameYearFirstWord — patel2024structural, chen2023ribosomal.
What this lets you do
- Drop the
.bibstraight into your LaTeX manuscript and cite by key with\cite{…}. The bibliography regenerates on every recompile. - Import into Zotero or Mendeley — every captured quote becomes a reference, with the quote text in the Notes column.
- Avoid citation errors. Year, journal, and authors come from OpenAlex's authoritative metadata, not your typing.
The benefit: the gap between "I read this great sentence" and "I cited this paper in my thesis" goes from ~15 minutes per quote to ~5 seconds. Across 80 quotes, that's 20 hours back.
Eleven columns: id, text, url, title, capturedAt, doi, openAlexId, authors, year, journal, publicationDate. RFC 4180, UTF-8 (no BOM — opens cleanly in Excel 2016+, pandas, R, sqlite).
What this lets you do
- Audit your own reading. Pivot by journal: "Am I reading broadly, or just the same five outlets?"
- Find the gap. Filter by year: "I have 30 quotes from 2020–2023 and zero from 2024 — I'm not reading recent enough."
- Run systematic-review screening in Excel or Google Sheets without re-keying anything.
- Drop into pandas for programmatic analysis — group by author, count quotes per journal, slice by date range.
The benefit: turns a passive list of quotes into a queryable database. Catches reading gaps before your committee does.
The full Quote object array — every field of every captured quote, lossless and deterministic.
What this lets you do
- Sleep at night. IndexedDB lives inside your Chrome profile — if it corrupts, you lose everything. JSON is the recovery file.
- Switch machines. Export from desktop, import on laptop via the popup's Import panel. Library is portable.
- Run
jqor Python scripts: "Show every quote captured before April with a DOI" — one line.
The benefit: insurance. Export to Dropbox once a month and never think about it — until the day you need it.
Each quote is a > blockquote with the source URL, a clickable DOI link, and (when present) the citation. Quotes separated by ---. Renders natively in every Markdown tool.
What this lets you do
- Drop into Obsidian — every quote becomes a backlinked block.
[[wikilink]]them from your thesis-chapter notes. - Open the file alongside your manuscript draft. Read your own captured quotes; pick what's relevant; copy into the draft with attribution already there.
- Click any DOI link — back in the original paper, in the original tab, in seconds.
The benefit: the synthesis layer. Markdown is where you think with your library; BibTeX is where you publish from it. They're complementary.
Pick the format that matches how you write
Every grad student has a different writing setup. Research Quote Capture exports to all four — pick what fits your workflow.
STEM in LaTeX
You write in LaTeX. You cite by key. \cite{patel2024structural} is muscle memory. BibTeX export drops directly into your .bib file alongside the rest of your references.
Humanities in Word
You draft in Word, but you think in Obsidian or a Markdown editor. Markdown export gives you a clean, blockquoted reading library you can synthesize from before you ever open the manuscript.
Systematic reviewer
You're running a PRISMA-style review. CSV export drops into your screening spreadsheet — text, source, DOI, journal, year — all in one row, ready to filter and code.
Privacy-conscious
You don't want your reading list on a vendor's server. JSON export is your offline backup. Save monthly to Dropbox; restore on any machine via the popup's Import panel.
Privacy & trust
Your reading list is some of the most sensitive metadata about your research. We treat it that way.
- Your selections never leave your computer. Quotes live in the browser's IndexedDB. Local only, always.
- No AI, no inference, no machine learning. Plain regex and DOM APIs.
- Scoped permissions. The extension declares
activeTabonly — it can't read any tab unless you press the shortcut on it. - License validation only. The only thing we send to our servers is your license key. For Pro users, we also send DOI strings to OpenAlex — never the selected text, never the URL.
- No tracking, no analytics, no telemetry in the extension itself.
Page reading: when you press the shortcut, the extension calls window.getSelection() and reads the page's URL, title, and citation meta tags (citation_doi, citation_title, etc.). Nothing else.
Two plans. Same features.
Capture, browse, and search are free forever. Export and OpenAlex citation enrichment are Pro. The 7-day trial is separate — start it inside the extension before you ever come here. Subscribe when you've decided Pro is worth it.
Monthly
- Unlimited capture, browse, search
- BibTeX, CSV, JSON, Markdown export
- OpenAlex citation enrichment
- 7-day free trial — no card required
Annual
- Everything in monthly
- One year of updates
- 7-day free trial — no card required
- Refund within 7 days of purchase
Frequently asked questions
How does the 7-day trial work? Do I need to enter a card?
No card. No payment. No Stripe page. The trial is fully independent of the subscription pipeline. After you install the extension from the Chrome Web Store, open the toolbar popup and click Start 7-day trial. The countdown starts on that click — locally, in your browser — and you have 7 days of full Pro access (export + OpenAlex citation enrichment). Nothing auto-charges because nothing was ever entered.
At the end of 7 days, the popup tells you the trial is over. If you want to keep Pro features, come back to this page and click Get monthly or Get annual — that's the point you go through Stripe. If you don't subscribe, the extension stays free forever for capture, browse, and search.
Can I subscribe directly without using the trial?
Yes. The pricing buttons above go to Stripe Payment Links — pick monthly or annual, enter your card, and your license key arrives by email. Paste the key into the extension popup (Already have a key?) and Pro unlocks immediately. The trial is opt-in, not required.
The keyboard shortcut isn't doing anything when I press Ctrl+Shift+Q.
Three usual causes: (1) Chrome assigned a different shortcut to the extension during install — open chrome://extensions/shortcuts and check the row for Research Quote Capture. (2) The shortcut is colliding with another extension or browser feature; reassign in the same place. (3) You're on a chrome:// internal page or the Web Store itself, where extensions can't run; try a regular web page.
Capture saved a quote but didn't pull citation metadata. Why?
Citation enrichment is a Pro feature and only runs when the page has a recognizable DOI. We look in this order: citation_doi meta tag, dc.identifier, JSON-LD, the URL path, and the visible page text. If none of those contain a valid DOI, the quote saves without citation data — which is the right behavior for blog posts, news articles, and other non-academic sources. If you believe the page does have a DOI, click the quote in the library and use "Edit DOI" to add it manually; OpenAlex will enrich on the next library load.
How do I actually use the BibTeX / CSV / JSON / Markdown exports?
BibTeX drops into Zotero (File → Import) or directly into a LaTeX .bib file; cite by the auto-generated key with \cite{…}. CSV opens in Excel or Google Sheets; pivot by journal, filter by year, or drop into pandas/R for analysis. JSON is the lossless backup — save monthly to Dropbox; restore via the popup's Import panel on a new machine. Markdown pastes into Obsidian, Logseq, or Notion as blockquotes with clickable DOI links — drafting workflow for the literature-review chapter. The popup has an in-app guide too: click the ? next to "Export" for recipes.
Why isn't capture working on this PDF?
v1.0 doesn't capture from Chrome's built-in PDF viewer — the viewer's selection API is inconsistent across pages and we don't ship a workaround that we trust. PDF capture is on the v1.2 roadmap. As a fallback, copy the text from the PDF and use the popup's "Paste quote" option (coming with v1.0.1).
Where are my quotes stored? Can I back them up?
In your browser's IndexedDB on your local machine. Pro users can export the entire library to JSON for backup or migration — and re-import via the popup's Import panel on a new machine. We don't store your quotes on our servers; there's no cloud sync.
Does it work on Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera?
v1.0 ships only on the Chrome Web Store. Edge, Brave, and Arc all support Chrome extensions and most users install successfully, but we don't officially test on them in v1.0. Firefox is not supported.
Can I use this for non-academic web pages — like blog posts or news articles?
Yes. The extension captures the selection, URL, page title, and timestamp on any page. The DOI/citation enrichment only triggers when the page has a recognizable DOI, so for blog posts and news the quote saves without citation metadata — which is what you want.
How is this different from Pocket, Instapaper, or Zotero's web clipper?
Pocket and Instapaper save articles for later reading — not selections-with-citation-context. Zotero's web clipper saves the article-level metadata into Zotero, but doesn't preserve the specific sentence you wanted to quote. Research Quote Capture is built around the unit grad students actually need: this exact sentence, from this exact paper, with the citation already attached.