Privacy policy

Short version: there are no accounts and no ads. We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are used. Your references stay in your browser and are never sent to analytics.

Your references

The sources you add are saved in your browser’s local storage on your device. They are not sent to our servers, and we cannot see them. Clearing your browser data deletes them, so export your list if you want to keep it.

Lookups

When you search by DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN, or arXiv ID, your browser requests the record directly from public services: Crossref, DataCite, the US National Library of Medicine (PubMed), arXiv, Open Library, and Google Books. Their own privacy policies apply to those requests.

When you search by URL, our server fetches that public web page to read its title, authors, and dates, and returns them to you. We do not store the URLs you look up.

PDFs

When you cite or import a PDF, it is read entirely in your browser. The file is never uploaded. Only the identifier found in it (such as a DOI) is looked up as described above, or, if it has none, its title is searched on Crossref.

Cookies and local storage

The only cookies on this site are set by Google Analytics (named _ga and _ga_*), which distinguish one visitor from another and last up to two years. We also use your browser’s local storage for two things: your saved references and your light or dark theme preference. Neither of those is used to track you, and both stay on your device.

Analytics and advertising

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used: which pages people visit, how they arrived, roughly where they are (country or city), and what device and browser they use. Google processes this data on our behalf under its own privacy policy. Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses. The sources you cite, the text you type, and the PDFs you open are never sent to Google Analytics.

You can opt out by blocking cookies for this site, using a content blocker, or installing Google’s Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The site works the same either way.

We don’t run advertising, we don’t use Google Analytics data for ads, and we never sell personal information.

Hosting

The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which processes standard request data (such as IP addresses) to deliver and protect the site. Cloudflare may keep this data briefly in logs for security and performance. See Cloudflare’s privacy policy for details.

Emailing us

If you email us, we receive your email address and whatever you include in your message. We use it only to reply, and delete it when it’s no longer needed.

Children

The service is intended for students and researchers. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13.

Your rights

Because we don’t keep accounts or store your references, there is usually nothing for us to access, correct, or delete. You can remove everything the site has stored, including the analytics cookies, by clearing your browser’s site data for csecitation.com. Google Analytics keeps this data for no more than 14 months, and it is not linked to your name or email. For any other privacy request, contact us.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle data, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email hello@csecitation.com or visit our contact page.