Capture quotes with their citation context — in one keystroke.
Press Ctrl+Shift+Q on any web page. Research Quote Capture saves your selection with the URL, page title, and (for academic papers) the DOI. Your library is private, local, and searchable. Built for grad students writing literature reviews.
The literature-review tax
- You copy-paste a quote into Zotero, Obsidian, or a Word doc — and lose the URL the second time you switch tabs.
- You bookmark the article instead of the quote, and have to re-skim a 30-page paper three weeks later to find the line.
- You collect quotes from PubMed, JSTOR, arXiv, Nature, blog posts — they end up in five different formats.
- When you finally write up a section, you spend more time reconstructing citations than arguing your point.
- Tools like Pocket and Instapaper save articles, not selections-with-context. They weren't built for citation work.
How it works
Select text
Highlight any passage on any page — an arXiv preprint, a Nature article, a PubMed abstract, a blog post.
Press Ctrl+Shift+Q
The extension saves the selection with the URL, page title, capture timestamp, and the DOI if the page has one. No popup, no tags, no friction.
Search later
Open the popup, full-text search across every quote you've captured. Pro users export to BibTeX, CSV, JSON, or Markdown.
Privacy & trust
- Your selections never leave your computer. Quotes live in the browser's IndexedDB. Local only.
- No AI, no inference, no machine learning in the extension. Plain regex and DOM APIs.
- Scoped permissions. The extension declares
activeTabonly — it can't read any tab unless you press the shortcut on it. - License validation only. The only thing we send to our servers is your license key. For Pro users, we also send DOI strings to OpenAlex for citation metadata — never the selected text, never the URL.
- No tracking, no analytics, no telemetry in the extension.
Page reading: when you press the shortcut, the extension calls window.getSelection() and reads the page's URL, title, and citation meta tags (citation_doi, citation_title, etc.). Nothing else.
Pricing
Monthly
- Unlimited capture, browse, search
- BibTeX, CSV, JSON, Markdown export
- OpenAlex citation enrichment
- 7-day free trial, no card required
Annual
- Everything in monthly
- One year of updates
- 7-day free trial, no card required
- Refund within 7 days of purchase
FAQ
The keyboard shortcut isn't doing anything when I press Ctrl+Shift+Q.
Three usual causes: (1) Chrome assigned a different shortcut to the extension during install — open chrome://extensions/shortcuts and check the row for Research Quote Capture. (2) The shortcut is colliding with another extension or browser feature; reassign in the same place. (3) You're on a chrome:// internal page or the Web Store itself, where extensions can't run; try a regular web page.
Capture saved a quote but didn't pull citation metadata. Why?
Citation enrichment is a Pro feature and only runs when the page has a recognizable DOI. We look in this order: citation_doi meta tag, dc.identifier, JSON-LD, the URL path, and the visible page text. If none of those contain a valid DOI, the quote saves without citation data — which is the right behavior for blog posts, news articles, and other non-academic sources. If you believe the page does have a DOI, click the quote in the library and use "Edit DOI" to add it manually; OpenAlex will enrich on the next library load.
Why isn't capture working on this PDF?
v1.0 doesn't capture from Chrome's built-in PDF viewer — the viewer's selection API is inconsistent across pages and we don't ship a workaround that we trust. We're tracking this for v1.2. As a fallback, copy the text from the PDF and use the popup's "Paste quote" option (coming with v1.0.1); for now, paste it into your notes app and we'll address PDF capture as a v1.2 priority.
Where are my quotes stored? Can I back them up?
In your browser's IndexedDB on your local machine. Pro users can export the entire library to JSON for backup or migration. Free users see the export option but it's gated until trial or upgrade. We don't store your quotes on our servers — there's no cloud sync.
Does it work on Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera?
v1.0 ships only on the Chrome Web Store. Edge, Brave, and Arc all support Chrome extensions and most users install successfully, but we don't officially test on them in v1.0. Firefox is not supported.
Can I use this for non-academic web pages — like blog posts or news articles?
Yes. The extension captures the selection, URL, page title, and timestamp on any page. The DOI/citation enrichment only triggers when the page has a recognizable DOI, so for blog posts and news the quote saves without citation metadata — which is what you want.