Simple Cite for Confluence Cloud
- Andreas Purde
What is it?
The Simple Cite Confluence app brings citation functionality to Confluence. The functionality can be compared to the citation you know from Wikipedia. You can define your own custom cites, refer to BibTeX cites included in an bib-file (as attachment or by URL) or refer to DOIs.
The Simple Cite for Cloud change log contains all relevant updates in the recent past.
Legal and policy documents
The following legal documents apply for all of our apps:
Configuration
Simple Cite does not need any system- or space-wide configuration.
How it works
Simple Cite provides a set of user macros. The main ones are shown in the image below.
In most uses you need a couple of cites from line 1 and 2 from the image below and a cite summary.
This image shows the relationship again:
The different macros explained
Image | Macro name(s) | What it does |
|---|---|---|
 | Single Cite | A single cite (e.g. the reference to a book) is reflected by this macro. You have to specify a unique ID, an optional location (like a page number) and can select some options:
The actual citation must be entered in the macro body - you can define any markup Confluence allows. This macro was one of the main macros used before Atlassian introduced their new editor. Since then the macro suffers from the inline-rendering issue which is (up to now) not fixed by Atlassian. Please avoid using this macro unless you want to define a citation bucket somewhere. |
Single Cite Basic | This macro offers a similar functionality as the one above but only allows limited formatting. This macro was introduced to mitigate the inline-rendering issue mentioned above. You can add internal and external links to a plain cite. | |
Single Cite Short | Once a cite has been fully qualified by the single cite macro it is possible to use that macro to refer to the same reference again just using the unique ID and the page-range if needed. | |
DOI Cite | With the DOI cite macro you can refer to a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) which automatically gets rendered in the specified CSL style (e.g. apa). The DOI 10.1109/VETECS.2010.5493979 requested in apa CSL style results in: Kusume, K., Dietl, G., Abe, T., Taoka, H., & Nagata, S. (2010). System Level Performance of Downlink MU-MIMO Transmission for 3GPP LTE-Advanced. 2010 IEEE 71st Vehicular Technology Conference. doi:10.1109/vetecs.2010.5493979 | |
BibTeX File Cite BibTeX Direct Cite | The BibTeX File Cite macro allows you to reference to a cite provided in a BibTeX file (*.bib). Simply specify the bib-file and provide the cite ID from the bib-file. You also have to define the CSL style (e.g. apa). You can select bib-files attached to any Confluence page or specify an URL. When using an URL please note that only https-connections are accepted. The BibTeX Direct Cite macro allows you to enter a single BibTeX cite directly. | |
 | Single Cite Import | You may use this macro to refer to a cite you defined on another Confluence page. Simply select the page you want to import the cite from and specify the ID of the cite. |
 | Cite Summary | At the end of a page containing cites you will probably want to have a reference section which shows you all the references you made in the article. This is achieved by the Cite Summary Macro. |
Space Cite Summary | The space cite summary macro allows you to specify a list of spaces (comma-separated list of space keys) and then shows all cites used in these spaces. The table generated allows to get an overview of e.g. which pages refer to a certain reference like a standard. | |
BibTeX Listing | Show a listing of all BibTeX cites of the given bib-file. Please note that the BibTeX listing is rendered when you insert it. Subsequent changes of the bib file to not change the listing unless you update the macro- |
Tips for creating a bibliography
In many use cases it can be useful to create one or multiple bibliographies which define all cites/citations centrally and other pages only refer to a cite out of the bibliographies.
In Simple cite you have multiple options to implement a bibliography.
Option 1: Define your bibliography on a Confluence page and use Single Cite Import
You can use any of the cite macros explained above to define all the citations belonging to your bibliography on a single page, use the bibliography output to get a convenient view on them and then use the Single Cite Import macro on the other pages.
Option 2: Use a BibTeX file
A BibTeX file (stored on Confluence or elsewhere) can host your entire bibliography. Just use the BibTeX File Cite to insert a cite on a page using this BibTeX file.
In order to get a better overview of what is inside the BibTeX file you can use BibTeX listing macro.
Option 3: Coming soon
Stay tuned
Frequent support cases
Observation/Question | Explanation/Answer |
|---|---|
PDF/Word export times out | In case you have many cites (> 100) on a page it might happen that the generation of a PDF or Word document times out. The reason is that Confluence Cloud requests each cite in a row not parallel. There is currently no mitigation. |
Migration from Server or Data Center | Please refer to migration guide for further details. |
We continuously amend this list.
Known limitations
The Single Cite macro is suffering from the inline-rendering issue introduced by Atlassian with the release of the new editor
Getting support
Please use our ticketing system to create a support ticket regardless whether you found a bug, have a feature request or questions.