Microsoft testing out new Edge feature to help students and researchers

By Sean Endicott
published

Microsoft is making it easy to manage and generate citations when browsing the web.

Edge Dev Hero 2020 Newfeature
Edge Dev Hero 2020 Newfeature (Image credit: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • A new Citations feature is in preview on Microsoft Edge.
  • The feature helps students manage and generate citations when researching online.
  • The Citations feature is available in preview within Collections on Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft is testing out a Citations feature on its Edge browser. The tool is designed to help students manage and generate citations when researching. At the moment, automatically extracting and creating citations is only supported for certain academic websites and research journals. Microsoft explains that it may expand this list in the future. Citations can be added manually if a website is not supported.

People can select a format that they'd like to create citations in, such as APA, MLA, and Chicago. Edge supports both in-text and full citations.

Citations lives within the Collections section of Edge. It's available in preview for Edge Dev and Canary, specifically versions 95 and higher. To try out Citations, you need to:

  1. Click on the Collections icon (it looks like a plus button within a square with a second square behind it).
  2. Click on the ellipsis menu.
  3. Click Turn on citations.
  4. Select the format you'd like citations to be generated in.

Source: Microsoft (Image credit: Source: Microsoft)

You can then manage citations within Collections on Edge. It's possible to manually edit details if the tool extracts incorrect information or if you need to enter details manually.

Citations is only in preview right now, but Microsoft explains that it's considering including the feature permanently.

Microsoft Edge Logo

 (opens in new tab)
Microsoft Edge


Microsoft is testing out a Citations feature within its Edge browser. With it, you can generate and manage citations in several formats.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

4 Comments
  • I know this won't matter for most users, but this would be a godsend if it ends up supporting Bluebook citations.
  • This is only useful if it then integrates with Word and others (e.g. Google Docs), so can cite these references in documents.
  • Exactly. What I really want though is Word/Office/Edge to recognize the standard formatting of citations. I'd just paste the correctly formatted citation into a field, or it would draw it from Edge Collections, and it would recognize author, title, journal, etc. and add it to my citations list in Word. Some very simple AI magic should do it. Filling in each field manually in Word is frustrating. And the Researcher feature in Word just doesn't cut it.
  • Excellent. Right now I use Google Scholar (which does something similar) and it's just cut and paste from there. Tying this to Collections is an improvement (though Collections still has UX intuitiveness issues that need to be sorted out). As mentioned above some sort of Word integration would be a big step forward.