Citation of any publication without adding

It would be useful to have a feature to generate citation of any publication according to chosen style without adding the reference to Paperpile.

I am curious what the use case is here? We have to go grab the metadata in any case, do you just not want the reference in your library?

I can think of a great work around - it’s called typing :slight_smile:

In fact, it is more of a personal reason. I thought it might be helpful for many others as well. This case arised when some of my students (who do not use paperpile) had to format thier citation using a specific style. This may be offered as a non-member utility. Can work as an ad to Paperpile. :wink:
Also, one may not want to add a reference such as a book or something, but they may have to get citation for some other purpose (such as for students, or to suggest some books in library).
This is just a thought.

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I understand wanting to have PP automatically format a citation and reference, Sunil. i.e., it would be nice if the author did not have to understand / know the formatting rules, and could just let an app do it. (I wouldn’t recommend it, but I understand the sentiment). However, the remaining question is - why remove it from PP? Or, said another way, what is so important that you would want both PP and the author to do extra work? For PP it’s extra work, because it would have to grab all the metadata, put it into the paper, then delete it all. Then if the author wants to change the citation, both PP and the author would have to go find the paper, re-insert the metadata, insert it into the paper, then delete it again. Also, apps in the area are imperfect (as is the metadata) - often, the citation and reference need tweaking. If the paper was not in the database, that would be impossible for the author to correct the misformatting.

Had another thought - are you asking for a way to use PP without paying for it? Or, a per-citation fee plan? it’s pretty cheap as it is…

Thank you for clarifying @sunilphys . We do have some plans for students who do not need our full set of features, but these may take some time. Currently, the easiest way is to use our free Paperpile Add-on for Google Docs. It functions much like Paperpile and does not require a subscription. It does, however, require users to first cite then format citations - just as in Paperpile - so we do not currently have any tools which will just give you the formatted entry.