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Select any folder of uploaded papers and ask Anara to generate a formatted reference list in your citation style. Anara reads the metadata from each document and returns every citation ready to paste into your bibliography. For anyone who has reached the end of a paper and still needs to finish the reference list.

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1. Describe the task

The paper is nearly done. The only thing left is the reference list, which means opening each paper in turn, finding the publication details, and formatting them one by one. For 40 papers in APA 7, that is most of an afternoon. Anara generates formatted citations for every paper in your library or any folder within it. It reads the metadata from each uploaded document and returns citation strings in the format you specify. Where multiple papers are cited across a conversation, you can ask for all of them at once and receive a complete bibliography section ready to paste. The output is grounded in your actual uploaded papers, not in a model’s memory of titles it may have encountered elsewhere. Here a PhD student in educational leadership has 60 papers in her dissertation folder, all uploaded as PDFs, and needs a complete APA 7 reference list for her final submission. 
Generate APA 7 citations for all papers in my dissertation folder. Return the full reference list in alphabetical order by first author's last name. If any citation looks incomplete due to missing metadata, flag it separately at the bottom with a note on what is missing.

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2. Give Anara context

Required context
  • Your library or the specific folder containing the papers you need cited.
Optional context
  • Your preferred citation format (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, CSE, ACS, Vancouver, AMA, ASA). Anara uses your workspace default if you do not specify.
  • A note or pasted list naming the specific papers you actually cited in your text. Anara can generate only the papers in that list rather than everything in the folder.

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3. What Anara creates

A formatted reference list, sorted alphabetically, with one citation per paper. Flagged incomplete citations appear at the bottom with a brief note on what metadata is missing, so you know exactly which entries need manual attention before submission. The output is the bibliography section you paste in, not a draft to clean up.

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4. Follow-up prompts

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Format for a different citation style

When you need to submit the same paper to a journal that uses a different standard. 
Regenerate the same reference list in Vancouver format for a biomedical journal submission. Number the entries in the order they appear in the text.

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Pull only the papers I actually cited

When your folder has more papers than you ended up citing in the final draft. 
Here is my full text with inline citations. Generate a reference list containing only the papers I actually cited. Ignore anything in my library that does not appear in the text.

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Export as BibTeX for a LaTeX document

When your writing environment is LaTeX and you need a .bib file rather than a formatted list. 
Export this reference list as BibTeX. Return one entry per paper with the correct field names: author, title, journal, year, volume, pages, doi.

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5. Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting

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How you word your prompt shapes what you get

Ask for the format by name and version: APA 7, not just APA. APA 6 and APA 7 differ on how journal articles are formatted and how DOIs are presented, and Anara will apply whichever version you name. If you want alphabetical order, say so. For numbered reference styles like Vancouver or IEEE, specify whether the numbers should reflect the order of first citation in your text or alphabetical order. Without that instruction, Anara defaults to alphabetical.

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Check the output against your own understanding

Anara generates citations from the metadata of your uploaded documents. If a paper was imported from a URL that served only an abstract page, or if the PDF contains scanned images rather than machine-readable text, the metadata may be sparse. Before running a full folder citation, check whether any papers show incomplete processing status in the document details panel. Papers missing authors, publication year, or journal name will produce incomplete citations. Fix the metadata before generating, or copy the correctly formatted citation from the publisher’s page and paste it manually for those entries.

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What to do with the output next

Paste the reference list into the bibliography section of your document. For Word documents, the text usually arrives as plain text and you apply your template’s reference paragraph style after pasting. For LaTeX, the BibTeX export creates the .bib file you compile alongside your main document. Once the list is in place, spot-check five or six citations against the original papers, focusing on page ranges and DOIs, which are the fields most likely to be missing if a paper was imported without full text.