Cite This Article – Author Box & Citation

Description

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Cite This Article helps web publishers make their articles easier to identify, credit, cite and save. It adds author information, reader-facing article citations and citation-aware metadata directly to WordPress posts.

Unlike traditional author-box plugins, Cite This Article combines author attribution with reader-facing article citations, citation metadata, and reference-manager exports.

Use it for single-author, multi-author or guest-author publishing, or add the Cite This Article panel on its own when your site already has an author presentation.

Use it in three ways:

• Author box only — publish author names, bios, images, and multiple- or guest-author information without displaying an article citation.
• Author box + Cite This Article — combine author information with a reader-facing article citation.
• Citation only — publish the article citation on its own when your site already has its own author presentation.

Cite This Article also publishes the article information that citation tools need to recognise the work correctly. Title, authors, publication date, publisher or site name and canonical URL can be exposed through citation-aware metadata, so reference managers and other tools do not have to reconstruct the article from a bare page title and URL.

Build author boxes for single- or multiple-author posts, add guest authors without creating WordPress accounts, use local images from the WordPress Media Library, or automatically resolve authors and guest authors from Co-Authors Plus.

Authors can appear together in one combined author box or in individual author cards, with their own bios and images where available.

Each author box can include a Cite This Article panel where readers can copy a formatted article citation or export the article to their reference manager.

Author Box

Cite This Article builds an author bio box from WordPress author profiles, with native support for multiple authors rather than requiring a particular multi-author plugin.

Multiple authors can come from manual entry, a supported author integration, or the standard WordPress post author. Manual authors can also be used as guest authors when you need to credit a contributor without creating a WordPress user account.

Authors can be displayed together in one combined author box or as separate individual author cards. Individual cards can use each author’s own avatar and biography, while one shared citation continues to represent the complete article and all of its authors.

Author-box presentation remains separate from the author data used to generate the article citation, so changing a bio or display setting does not replace the citation author list.

Author Box Features

• Native multiple-author support — no multi-author plugin required
• Guest authors without WordPress accounts
• Combined author box or individual author cards
• Automatic use of WordPress author profiles and bios
• Automatic Co-Authors Plus author and guest-author support
• WordPress profile avatars and local images from the Media Library
• Per-author bio and description overrides
• Flexible layouts, image modes, avatar shapes and sizes
• “More from …” links to each author’s other posts, including Co-Authors Plus guest authors
• Lightweight front-end output with no external framework dependency

Article Citations & Citability

The reader-facing Cite This Article panel turns the finished WordPress article into something readers can identify, cite, and save more reliably. It generates a citation for the current article covering all resolved authors and remains shared when those authors are displayed as separate individual cards.

Readers can copy the citation in one click or export it as BibTeX, RIS, or CSL-JSON for their reference manager. Citations can render in house, APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard style, with an optional reader-facing style switcher.

Posts and pages can expose citation-aware metadata including Highwire citation tags, Dublin Core fields, author metadata and publication dates. This gives reference managers and citation tools a better chance of identifying the article’s author, title, date, publisher and URL correctly, instead of falling back to a bare page title and link.

Every post and page also has a Citation details panel in the editor sidebar, where you set the author or authors, whether they are a person or an organization, the title, the publication date — or no date at all — and the site name, with a preview of the citation a reader will copy. Those values drive the citation box, the citation metadata and the author schema together, so the three can never describe the same page differently.

Pages start out cited as the site, as an organization, with no date, because the date WordPress records for a page is when someone created the draft rather than when the work was published. Posts keep their real author and publication date. Any page can say otherwise in its own panel.

Article Citation Features

• Ready-to-copy article citations
• Per-page Citation details: author, author type, title, date or “no date”, and site name
• House, APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard styles
• Optional reader-facing style switcher
• BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON export
• Citation-aware page metadata
• Multi-author article citations
• Organisational-author support
• Citation-only mode for sites with an existing author box
• Overrides for article authors, title, URL, publication date and publisher or site name
• Gutenberg support

Publisher Citation Templates

Premium lets you define your own citation formats for the things you publish that are not articles: photographs, datasets, archival records, museum objects, reports. A template has a name, a shortcode name (slug), the attributes an editor fills in, and the order they are written in. Editors choose the template in the Cite This Article block, or name it in the shortcode, and supply the values. Readers get the same citation panel and Copy button as an article citation.

Templates are created by administrators under Cite This Article → Citation Templates. Start from a blank template or from one of the examples (photograph, dataset, organization article, archival document) and change it as you like.

Attributes

Each attribute has a label, a name used in the shortcode (such as photo_title), a type (text, date, URL or number), whether it is required, and an optional default value. Dates are entered as YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD and can be shown in several formats; a date with no day is never given one. Names that the shortcode already uses — such as title, url, author, style and template — are not allowed, so use something specific like photo_title. Once a template is saved, its attribute names cannot be renamed, because existing citations use them.

Citation parts

A template is one list of parts in the order the citation is written. Each attribute part has text before and after it, a sample value and a Required box; its type, default and other options are under More. That before-and-after text belongs to its part, so when an optional attribute is left empty its punctuation goes with it. Fixed text can be shown always, or only between parts that have values. Drag a part by its handle to move it, or use the arrow keys. The preview beside the list renders with the same code your readers see, and can be checked with only the required values filled in.

Shortcode examples

[cite_this_article template="photo-citation" photo_title="Portrait of diplomatic rescuer George Mandel-Mantello" archive_number="45670" repository="Photo Archives" courtesy="Eric Saul" copyright_holder="United States Holocaust Memorial Museum"]

[cite_this_article template="dataset-citation" dataset_title="Population Dataset" creator="Research Institute" year="2026" version="2.1" doi="10.1234/example"]

[cite_this_article template="org-article" organization="World Health Organization" article_title="Global report on hygiene" publication="WHO Bulletin" pub_date="2024-05-07" article_url="https://who.example/report"]

display, `toggle` and `label` work as they do for article citations. To put a double quote or square bracket inside a value, write `"`, `[` or `]`. Values containing many quotes or brackets are easier to enter in the block.

In the block editor

Add the Cite This Article block and choose a template under What this cites. The block shows that template’s attributes as fields, marks the required ones, and previews the citation as you type. Use as many blocks on a page as you need, for example one under each photograph.

What is being cited

[cite_this_article] on its own cites the article. A template citation cites the object you describe, so it never fills a missing value from the article's title, author or date. An attribute can take a value from the post only when its template says so (for example "When left empty, use this post's title").

If a required value is missing, or the template does not exist, readers see nothing and people who can edit the post see a short note explaining why.

Template citations are not added to the page’s citation meta tags or author schema, which continue to describe the article. They offer formatted text and Copy only, with no BibTeX, RIS or CSL-JSON export, because publisher-defined attributes have no reliable mapping to those formats.

A citation identifies a work and where it came from. It does not grant permission to reuse it. Credit and copyright lines you include in a template are shown as written.

Changing and deleting templates

Changing a template updates every citation that uses it; the values stored in your posts stay as they are. Renaming a template’s slug keeps the old slug working. Before a template is deleted you are shown the posts, pages and reusable blocks that use it, and deleted templates can be restored from Recently deleted.

If a Premium licence lapses, citations that are already published keep displaying. Creating and editing templates, and choosing them in the block, need an active licence.

Author Schema

Cite This Article can describe each article’s authors in schema.org structured data, using the same authors the author box shows: multiple authors, guest authors, and organizations included.

It’s on by default, for the same content types as the citation metadata, so each article publishes its author, date and publisher as structured data as well as meta tags. Untick “Enable author schema” in the settings and nothing is added.

Author Archive Pages

Author archive pages can open with the author’s profile: photo, bio, website, and number of posts. Tick “Show the author profile in the author archive header” in the settings. The “Author: Name” heading becomes the author’s name, and the profile sits beneath it. Your theme’s post list, pagination, and layout are left as they are.

It works with block themes and classic themes, and with Co-Authors Plus guest-author archives. The archive version never includes a citation, since an archive is a changing list of posts rather than a single article.

To place the profile yourself, use the Author Archive Header block in your author template, or call citekit_abc_author_archive_header() in a classic theme’s author.php. A page never shows more than one profile header. Themes that place it themselves can declare add_theme_support( 'citekit-author-archive' ) to turn the automatic placement off.

Integrations

Co-Authors Plus

Co-Authors Plus is supported automatically.

When Co-Authors Plus is active, Cite This Article can use all authors assigned to the post, including guest authors, guest-author avatars, and guest-author descriptions. Authors can appear together or as individual cards, and every resolved author is included in the article citation.

If Co-Authors Plus is not installed, Cite This Article continues to work with its native multiple-author and guest-author handling and the standard WordPress author system.

Reference Manager handles the sources your article cites. Cite This Article handles the article itself as a source — its authors, title, publication date, publisher, citation formats and citation metadata.

External Services

Cite This Article builds author boxes, citations and citation metadata from what is already in your WordPress install. It does not send your posts, your authors or your visitors’ data anywhere, and it makes no requests from the front end of your site.

Freemius — the plugin’s licensing and update service. It is contacted from the WordPress admin for licence checks and plugin updates, and, if you open the Upgrade screen and choose to buy, to load the checkout at checkout.freemius.com. It also handles the optional opt-in when you activate the plugin; if you skip the opt-in, no account data is shared.
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