Cutting and pasting when doing legal research using your browser is simple. But having to construct the citation for what you pasted is not so simple. This is especially true with legal citations from sources like Westlaw. You have to stop and copy the case name separately, determine the pinpoint page numbers, and adjust the date and court name format.

So I decided to write a browser plugin that would automatically add a pinpoint citation to the text I copy and paste. Thus CiteGenie™ was born.

How it works

When CiteGenie™ is installed, it adds a new option to the browser's right-click menu to "Copy with CiteGenie."  To use CiteGenie, simply highlight the text in the court opinion, right-click and select the "Copy with CiteGenie" option (or just press Ctrl-Shift-C).  Then you can paste the text into any other program, such as your word processor, and the text will be pasted, along with the pinpoint citation for the selected text from the court opinion.  This illustrated example shows CiteGenie™ in operation.

CiteGenie™ does not access the web site containing the document you are copying from. What many people don't realize is that when you are vewing a document in your browser, your computer already has a complete copy of that document already in its memory. CiteGenie™ does what a human would do -- it starts from the point where you are copying text, and looks at the surrounding text (already in your computer's memory) to determine the citation for that text.

CiteGenie™ will create citations in Bluebook, MLA, APA, Chicago, and Wikipedia formats.

CiteGenie™ has been tested and works in Firefox 1.5 through 9.x. For later versions of Firefox, please try the current beta version of CiteGenie.