Is formatting really free?

Yes, on every plan including the free tier. It never touches the corpus and costs us nothing but CPU — we bill for finding a source, not for commas.

How many sources should a chapter have?

We default to twelve. The measured norm is two to four footnotes per source; with eight sources a thirty-footnote chapter sits at the top of that range, with twelve it sits in the middle.

Can I export to a reference manager?

BibTeX and RIS are available through the include field on the formatting call.

A whole reference list, not one citation at a time

Send a subject and get a set of citable sources ranked by how much of it they cover. Send metadata and get the list back formatted, sorted and ready to paste.

Get a test key Documentation

The list is the deliverable

Formatting a single citation is a solved problem — several libraries do it and so do we, for free. What is not solved is the step before: deciding which twelve sources a chapter should stand on, so that no single work carries a quarter of the footnotes and no obvious position is missing. That is a selection problem, not a punctuation problem, and it is the one this endpoint answers.

Two calls, two jobs

1
Select the sources
A subject in, a ranked set out, with coverage measured over the sources you have not used yet.
2
Format the list
Metadata in, footnotes and bibliography entries out — APA 7, MLA, Chicago, Polish footnote style, BibTeX, RIS.
3
Sort and paste
sort: true returns the whole bibliography as one field, already in alphabetical order.

POST /api/ext/chapter-sources

The exclude field lists what you have already used, so coverage is computed over what remains — consecutive chapters stop receiving the same material.

curl -s -X POST https://cytado.com/api/ext/chapter-sources \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CYTADO_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "topic": "czas ekranowy dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym",
  "chapter": "Wprowadzenie",
  "exclude": []
}'

Full reference, every field and error code →

What formatting will not fix

We format what you send. If the metadata is wrong, the entry will be wrong in perfect APA — which is why the selection call matters more than the formatting one, and why formatting is free while finding a source is not. Sources we may not republish come back as metadata and a link, never as full text.

FAQ

Is formatting really free?: Yes, on every plan including the free tier. It never touches the corpus and costs us nothing but CPU — we bill for finding a source, not for commas.
How many sources should a chapter have?: We default to twelve. The measured norm is two to four footnotes per source; with eight sources a thirty-footnote chapter sits at the top of that range, with twelve it sits in the middle.
Can I export to a reference manager?: BibTeX and RIS are available through the include field on the formatting call.

Build one list and look at it

Pick a subject you know well and see which twelve sources come back — that is the fastest way to judge whether the selection is any good.

Create an account

Looking for something else? Check whether a citation is real · Ground a sentence in a source that actually says it · the API overview