Scholar Sidekick

Scholar Sidekick is a fast, deterministic citation resolver, formatter, and exporter for researchers, clinicians, students, librarians, and AI agents. Paste any scholarly identifier — DOI, PubMed ID (PMID), PMCID, ISBN, ISSN, arXiv ID, ADS bibcode, or a WHO IRIS URL — and Scholar Sidekick fetches the bibliographic record from authoritative sources (Crossref, PubMed, arXiv, Open Library, ADS, and others), normalizes the metadata, and renders a clean citation in your chosen style. Five high-quality builtin styles — Vancouver, AMA, APA, IEEE, and CSE — are tuned for accuracy and speed. Beyond those, the full Citation Style Language (CSL) catalog of 10,000+ styles is available, including journal-specific dependent styles that automatically resolve to their parent style. Outputs travel anywhere your workflow needs: • Plain text, HTML, and Markdown for direct paste • RIS, BibTeX, CSL-JSON, and EndNote XML for reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, Papers, Bookends, JabRef, Citavi) • CSV for spreadsheets • Streaming NDJSON for batch pipelines Beyond the web app, Scholar Sidekick exposes a public REST API with a documented OpenAPI spec, rate-limited tiers (free, pro, ultra, mega), deterministic response headers (request ID, cache state, style provenance, fallback warnings), and per-request observability. It also ships a Chrome extension for one-click citation capture from any page, and an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so AI assistants like Claude can resolve and format citations natively. Designed to be the boring, correct piece of citation infrastructure: • Allowlisted outbound fetches with timeouts, AbortController, and bounded retries • Two-tier caching (in-memory LRU + persistent KV) for sub-second repeat lookups • Strict input validation and SSRF protection at the route boundary • Structured JSON logs and Sentry error tracking • 99% line / 98% function / 97% branch test coverage enforced in CI • Deployed on Vercel (Next.js 16 App Router, serverless + edge) Use cases: • Drop a DOI into a paper draft and get a perfectly formatted reference • Bulk-export a reading list from PubMed IDs to RIS for Zotero • Wire the API into a thesis-writing workflow or a literature review tool • Let an AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT) resolve citations on demand via MCP • Replace fragile in-house citation code with a maintained, audited service Free to use on the web, with paid API tiers for higher volume.