PaperGuide PDF Citation Generator vs Petal

PaperGuide PDF Citation Generator extracts bibliographic metadata from PDF files and formats references in styles such as APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver, and Harvard. The free generator works without signup or an account. Created citations appear in a bibliography saved in the browser, where they can be copied or exported. Paperguide is also a wider research platform for literature reviews, systematic reviews, and evidence synthesis. AI Search synthesizes answers from more than 200 million papers and links claims to sources. Reference Manager imports from Zotero and Mendeley and accepts papers by DOI. The Chrome extension captures papers and metadata, retrieves PDFs, generates citations from a library, and supports chats with webpages or papers. Paperguide MCP connects research-paper search and management to Claude, ChatGPT, or another MCP client. Systematic Review includes dual-reviewer screening and PRISMA reporting. The web and extension are available, with a free tier and paid plans from $12/user/mo (annual).

Petal is a web-based research assistant and reference manager for academic work, also available as a browser extension. Its plans include a free tier and paid options listed from $4.99/user/mo (annual). It helps users narrow literature reviews and compare studies, while providing a library for uploading and organizing PDFs with collections, metadata, and tags. AI tools offer translation, summaries, explanations, key-point extraction, suggestions for questions and search terms, and conversational assistance. Shared workspaces support group projects, co-authored papers, and reviews. The citation generator supports more than 10,000 styles and can copy citations or export them to BibTeX or Word. References can be brought in through identifiers such as DOI, PMID, ArXivID, ISBN, ISSN, and EAN, or by capturing metadata from URLs. Browser add-ins are listed for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, alongside a Word add-in for citations and bibliographies. The free plan includes 1 GB storage, one seat, three guests, 400 AI credits, two collections, and three annotations per document; citation export is not included.