Manage your bibliography: APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE

You do not build a bibliography in CiteDash AI so much as watch it assemble itself. Every citation you make while reading, synthesising, and drafting is a database row linked to a real paper, and the Reference Manager renders those rows as your reference list. There is no free-text reference to typo, and no invented entry to catch, because a citation that does not resolve to a real paper cannot exist here. This guide is about managing that list: styles, integrity, retractions, and getting it out.

1. Four styles, one source of truth

Your project has one citation style, and the Reference Manager renders the whole bibliography in it (APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE) through a real CSL processor, so numbering, ordering, and punctuation come out the way journals actually expect. Change the style once from the picker and it re-renders immediately.

Because the style lives on the project, the same choice follows every surface that shows references: the pane under your chapters in the Thesis Editor, the manuscript preview, and the compiled document. Switch venues and you restyle everything from one control, never by retyping a single entry.

2. Every row resolves, and the panel proves it

The integrity rail is computed from your real data, never hardcoded. It reports a fabricated count of zero (true by construction, but measured, not assumed) and how many entries resolve to a verifiable source. It draws an honest distinction most tools blur: an entry imported without a DOI or index id resolves to a record but has no independent provenance, so it is counted separately as user-asserted rather than laundered in with confidently-grounded sources. Adding a DOI moves it across.

The rail also shows full-text coverage: how many references CiteDash holds the actual PDF for, versus those indexed only by abstract. That matters because only a paper whose full text is held can be cited with grounded, fact-checked claims. An "issues to tidy" list flags smaller metadata gaps, like a missing DOI, with a link to the source or a way to read it in CiteDash.

3. Retraction protection, checked live

A paper can be retracted after you cite it, so retraction is temporal: the Reference Manager re-checks it live as the list renders. A retracted source is flagged in red in your bibliography and never reads as a clean reference. When you export BibTeX, retracted papers are excluded from the file and the count of what was dropped is reported, so nothing is silently re-exported into your reference library.

4. Export both ways

There are two exports. BibTeX (.bib) is the structured file for Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, or LaTeX, and it preserves your original cite keys: an entry you imported as smith2020 leaves as smith2020, so an existing LaTeX document keeps compiling without a find-and-replace. The formatted list (.txt) is your references rendered in the project's current style, ready to paste into a document. That button stays disabled until the project's style is known, so it can never write a durable file in the wrong style.

5. Held references: kept, but not yet citable

Papers you imported as metadata-only, or starred for later, appear in a separate "Held references" section. They are deliberately not citable yet, because CiteDash only lets generated text cite a paper whose full text it holds (the only way a claim can be verified against a source). They are never mixed into the real reference list or the integrity counts.

Promoting them is one click. "Find PDFs" requests the open-access PDF for every fetchable held reference at once; each one that resolves becomes citable automatically. For anything without an open copy, upload the PDF from the Library and it joins your citable sources.

Why this list survives an examiner

• Zero fabricated entries, by construction: every line resolves to a real paper record.
• One project-wide style, rendered by a real CSL processor and consistent across editor, preview, and compile.
• Retractions caught live and excluded from exports, with the count reported.
• BibTeX round-trips with your own cite keys intact, so your LaTeX keeps working.
• Held references stay visibly non-citable until their full text arrives, so nothing uncheckable slips into a citation.