What’s New in CiteKit

CiteKit has come a long way. From a handful of shortcodes to a full reference library, hover tooltips, numbered footnotes, and a block-editor-native experience. Every release below marks a step in that progression.

Recent highlights? Source types and expanded fields that make journal articles, books, and chapters render the way they should. Numbered footnotes with hover popups, a Bibliography block for the editor, dashed-underline tooltips with inline terms, and a friendlier Getting Started experience to help you get your citations off the ground.

Have a scroll through the changelog below to see how CiteKit has grown, and what’s landed in your latest update. Happy citing.

3.2.1 May 26, 2026

Improved: APA author rendering now uses initials (Brown, B.) rather than full first names, matching APA 7th edition convention.
Improved: Organizational authors (World Health Organization, Stanford University, etc.) are now detected and passed through unchanged rather than being mangled into initial form.
Fixed: Double period after author initials in APA, MLA, and Chicago bibliography entries.

3.2.0 May 25, 2026

New: You can now tell CiteKit what kind of source each citation is – a journal article, a book, a chapter, a report, a news article, a thesis, or a plain web page. Each type asks for the fields that actually matter for it.
New: Lots more fields are available where they make sense – Journal, Volume, Issue, Pages, Publisher, Place, Edition, and DOI. You’ll find them under “More fields” in CiteBox, and in the block editor sidebar.
New: Multiple authors are supported. Enter them as “Smith, Jane; Doe, John” and each style handles the names the way it’s supposed to.
Improved: Bibliographies now render properly per source type. A journal article in Chicago, MLA, APA, Harvard, or IEEE actually looks like a journal article – with volume, issue, pages, and DOI when you’ve filled them in. Books show publisher and edition. Chapters, reports, news, and theses each get the treatment they should.
Improved: The six built-in styles have been cleaned up across the board — punctuation, field order, italics — to match what each style guide actually calls for.
Improved: The block editor sidebar panel now has the full set of fields. The toolbar popover stays small for quick inserts.
Existing citations carry over automatically. Anything from before 3.2.0 starts out as a web page and you can change it whenever you like.

3.1.1 May 11, 2026

New: Added “Create Example Post” option to the Getting Started page to help users quickly test citations, tooltips, footnotes, and bibliographies.
Improved: Minor Getting Started onboarding flow enhancements.

3.1.0 April 22, 2026

New: Numbered footnote feature. The [footnote]...[/footnote] shortcode and Footnote toolbar format. Each footnote is auto-numbered in order of appearance and renders as a superscript marker with hover popup.
New: [footnotes] shortcode and Footnotes by CiteKit block, which renders the full numbered list at the end of the post with back-links to each marker. Explicit list mode also supported: [footnotes]one; two; three[/footnotes].
New: Tooltip dashed and dotted underline styles. ^†Definition renders the tip attribute as the visible inline term (dashed underline by default; dotted available via style="dotted"), and the content between the tags as the definition shown on hover. Symbol-marker mode (style="*", style="†", etc.) remains fully supported and backward compatible. In symbol mode the shortcode content continues to serve as the popup.
New: “Footnotes by CiteKit” and “Bibliography by CiteKit” block names in the block inserter.
New: Getting Started page with side-by-side feature cards explaining citations, tooltips, footnotes, and bibliographies, plus a decision guide for which to use.
Improved: Inline citation markers now render at baseline text level (e.g. [1]) instead of superscript, matching IEEE convention and creating clear visual hierarchy with footnote markers (which remain superscript). This makes citations and footnotes instantly distinguishable at a glance.
Improved: Editor caret behavior after inserting a citation, tooltip, or footnote. A zero-width space is now appended so the cursor lands cleanly after the inserted token instead of getting stuck.

3.0.0 April 6, 2026

New: Bibliography block. Render a formatted bibliography directly from the block editor with style and heading controls in the sidebar.
New: CiteKit block category in the Gutenberg inserter.
New: Citation inline format. Toolbar button on paragraphs, headings, list items, and quote blocks.
New: Tooltip inline format. Toolbar button to wrap selected text in a hover tooltip with custom marker symbol.
New: attribute. Set a custom superscript marker per tooltip. Defaults to † if omitted. Backward-compatible with all existing usage.
New: Getting Started page with step-by-step slideshow.
Improved: CiteBox metabox now displays truncated UUIDs alongside custom IDs so auto-assigned references are clearly distinguishable.
Improved: All library queries now find both shortcode-based and block-based citations.
Removed: Add Reference from Library button. References are created naturally by inserting citations in posts.

2.0.0 March 21, 2026

New: Redesigned Reference Library with sort, search, and status filtering.
New: Link Health Checker. Checks whether source URLs are live or broken, with per-citation status badges.
New: Settings page (CiteKit Library › Settings). Set a default bibliography style and heading used by all shortcodes site-wide.
New: Remove from Post. Remove a citation from a specific post directly from the Used In modal.
New: post_count column. Tracks how many posts reference each citation; unused records are cleaned up automatically.
Improved: ID column added to CiteBox metabox.
Fixed: bibliography heading now correctly uses the saved default title in all rendering paths.

1.0.0 June 4, 2025

Initial release.
Shortcode support for cite , bibliography, and tooltip.
Post-level citation editor (metabox).
Citation Library in admin sidebar.
APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE citation style support.