Highlight formatted citations in Google Docs

[Darrin_Schultz]

One thing that I have come to enjoy while writing is having the citations in my documents be highlighted in a different color than the rest of the text. When I make them in Google Docs, they are blue and underlined (photo attached). The blue and underlined, unformatted Paperpile citations are easy to find, and I can tell if someone has edited them inadvertently. When I format the citations for the target journal, all the text turns black.

It would be nice if we had control to edit the color, or highlight color, of the formatted Paperpile citations. This would help with navigability!

I got this idea when I encountered a coauthor who highlighted all the citations, figure and table callouts (Fig. 1), and other document features with different highlighting colors.

What do you think?

[suzanne]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, @Darrin_Schultz. The request for color-coding in-text citations has come up before, so I’ve recorded your +1 on our internal feature tracker, along with your thoughts.

As a workaround, you can use our optional sidebar add-on to unformat your citations. Many users have found this useful for reviewing large manuscripts, but you will still have to format the citations to black before submitting your manuscripts.

[Darrin_Schultz]

Thank you, @suzanne ! I did not know about the sidebar add-on, so I am going to try that now.