Citation Linker
Turn plain-text citations into clickable links — [1] and (Smith, 2020) markers jump to their reference entry or resolve to a DOI.
Make PDF citations clickable, without touching the layout
What this tool does
Academic PDFs are full of dead citations: [12] or (Smith et al., 2020) printed as plain text, with the actual reference sitting twenty pages later. This tool activates them. It scans the document's text, finds the reference section, matches every in-text marker to its entry, and overlays invisible link annotations — so clicking a citation jumps straight to the reference, or out to its DOI.
Nothing about the page changes visually. Links are annotation overlays, not edits to the content stream, so fonts, spacing and layout are byte-identical underneath.
How the matching works
Both major citation styles are detected automatically.
Numeric markers
[1], [1-3] ranges and [1, 4, 7] lists match numbered reference entries — [12] links to entry 12.
Author-year markers
(Smith, 2020), (Smith et al., 2020), (Smith and Jones, 2020) and narrative 'Smith et al. (2020)' match by surname and year.
DOI links
When a reference entry contains a DOI, its citations can link straight to doi.org instead of jumping internally.
Review map
Every reference lists where it's cited and on which pages. Unmatched markers can be assigned by hand before export.
Internal jump or external DOI — per reference
Each reference entry gets its own link mode. The default is a DOI link when the entry text contains one (10.xxxx/… or a doi.org URL) and an internal page jump otherwise. Switch any entry between the two, edit the DOI or URL directly, or disable an entry entirely so its markers stay plain text.
Internal jumps land on the reference's own line, not just its page — the destination is an /XYZ anchor at the entry's baseline, so the reader scrolls the entry into view.
Private and reader-agnostic
The scan, the matching and the PDF rewrite all run in your browser — the document is never uploaded, and no DOI lookups hit the network. The links are standard PDF Link annotations, so they work in Acrobat, browsers, and every mainstream reader.
This is built for deep literature reading, pre-publication hyperlinking, and turning a supervisor's or co-author's flat PDF into something navigable.
Citation Linker: Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about this tool and how it works.
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