CloudCite

Here to break Chegg dominance, provide accurate citations, source analysis & suggest, & better autofill. Ad-free.

Comment

CloudCite provides a clean, simple, and distraction-free environment for when you really need to create bibliographies and focus on research.

Avoid the popups, countdowns, and ads and switch now

Why are citations and bibliographies important?

What is called imitation in acting, parody in popular culture, mimicry in biology, and simulation in tech, is called plagiarism or copying in academic works. If you are a student or researcher, you're probably familiar with creating citations. Citations tell readers that ideas expressed in your works are not original or your own. Citations also allow others to fact check your arguments or information against the original source of that information, provide evidence and bolster your claims if a source is cited correctly, and give credit to the right people.

Inspiration

Our team grew frustrated with other bibliography generators who use proprietary code which rarely seems to improve, ads with unavoidable 30-second video popups, loads tracking, slow loading, weak security, mixed SSL content, and inaccurate autofill. Research is a long process that requires a focused environment. Citing sources should not be a slow and difficult process, where we need to watch 30-second videos, take surveys, and wait an unreasonable amount of time. When our team looked for other citation services, there were few viable options. Most of them have been bought by one company and have been modified to incorporate the ad-cluttered experience we want to avoid.

We decided to start the CloudCite project to offer a COMPLETELY free alternative to the other bibliography generators with a focus on productivity and usability. Our team's goal is to provide all of the features that people expect from a citation generation service with a simple workflow and clean user interface without any distractions.

Other citation generators such as Cite This For Me, CitationMachine, BibMe, and EasyBib are all owned by Chegg. With this dominance, Chegg has no need to improve its products. Learn more about Chegg's dominance.

What does CloudCite do?

CloudCite processes citations in the cloud so you never have to create citations manually again.

We use the same, reliable citation engine our major competitors use so you don't have to worry about inaccurate citations! CloudCite uses the over 8900 standardized citation styles maintained by the Citation Styles Language (CSL) project. CSL is used by bibliography generators including Cite This For Me, CitationMachine, BibMe, and EasyBib.

What sets us apart from the competition

CloudCite offers the following unique features:

  • Quick Cite - based on the main topics in your current bibliography, we suggest additional sources to quickly add to your bibliography
  • Source Analysis - we make sure you're using reliable sources
  • Switch - you can migrate existing projects and bibliographies by exporting projects from those solutions and importing them into CloudCite
  • Ad-Free - we leverage serverless deployment and client-side processing to lower our costs and provide this service WITHOUT any annoyances and distractions such as ads or pop-ups
  • No Paywalls - you DO NOT need to pay us to access basic features such as to use other citation styles such as APA, and Chicago/Turbian, to use our export options, or to remove distracting ads and pop-up videos you need to watch to access your citations.
  • Better Autofill - we use APIs to help us fill in crucial information so you don't have to do unnecessary manual work.
  • Focus on privacy and security preservation - We use SSL, TLS 1.3, HSTS, and a CSP policy to prevent unauthorized data access and manipulation.
  • 100% Open Source - our entire codebase is open source under AGPLv3 and open to community feedback and contribution directly to our code.
  • Fast - we use HTTP/2.0 and Brotli Compression to serve you our website and a service worker to help quickly create bibliographies.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

  • CloudCite took much more time to build than our past three projects combined.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

  • CloudCite is the first 100% open-source full-function bibliography generator

What we learned

The CloudCite team has learned we have the power to create competition even when the odds such as Chegg dominance and SEO optimization are against us.

What's next for CloudCite

...

Built With

Share this project:
×

Updates