I don’t accept paid advertisements. I do, however, have a standing offer to write a short, honest post about a student-oriented product if the company is willing to donate to a charity of my choice. (See here for more details.)

Citelighter recently took me up on my offer by donating money to Bottom Line, a great Boston-based organization that helps more students get access to college. I spent a morning looking over the Citelighter product, and here’s what I liked…

  • I have a high threshold for integrating technology into my study processes because I find that most services are more trouble to setup and use than sticking with a simpler low-tech alternative. Citelighter is one of the few technologies that passes my threshold.
  • In short, it allows you to highlight any text you can view in your browser and then stores it along with the relevant citation. If it can’t find all of the information it needs for the citation, it asks you to fill in what’s missing. (Once anyone has filled in the missing information, however, everyone benefits.)
  • Must crucially, this works for Google Books (click the plain text link to get the text you’re viewing into a highlightable form).
  • When you’re done, you can export all the citations you found into whatever format you want. (Word, Google Docs, etc.)
  • Bottom line: I hate how much time goes into tracking down and formatting citations. For many students, this service will help.

This video explains things better than I can…