How-to · Research
How to highlight and save quotes from web pages — with the source attached
The short answer
Select the passage on the page, save it to CiteRoam's evidence library, and the quote is stored together with where it came from — ready to cite in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard. Everything stays in your browser: no account, no upload.
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Select the passage you want to keep on the page or PDF.
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Save it to the evidence library from the CiteRoam side panel.
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Repeat as you read — each quote is stored together with the page's citation details.
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When writing, copy the quote from the library into your document.
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Add the matching reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard from the same entry.
The weak point of most highlighter extensions isn't the highlighting — it's what happens three weeks later, when you want to use the quote in a paper and can't reconstruct where it came from. A quote you can't attribute is a quote you can't use. The fix is to save the selection and its source as one unit.
Select the passage and save it
Highlight the sentence or paragraph on the page, then save it to CiteRoam's evidence library from the side panel. The selection is stored as a quote — not a screenshot, not a bookmark — so you can search it and copy it as text later. Saving takes a second, which matters: the cheaper capture is, the more of your reading actually survives into notes.
The source travels with the quote
Alongside the text, the library keeps the provenance: the page's citation details, built locally from its metadata. When you use the quote, the matching reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard is one click away — no retracing your browser history to find the original page.
It works on PDFs too
Research rarely stays in HTML — half of what you'll want to quote sits in journal articles and reports. Select a passage in a PDF you're viewing in Chrome and save it the same way; the quote and the PDF's citation land in the same library as your web sources, so one place holds the whole project.
From saved quote to cited paragraph
When you write, pull the quote from the library, paste it, and add the citation in your chosen style. Because quote and source were captured together, the step where misattribution usually happens — matching loose highlights back to URLs — simply doesn't exist.
What this is, and isn't
CiteRoam collects quotes for writing; it is not a page-painting highlighter. It doesn't re-draw your marks on the page when you revisit it — if colour-coded marks on the live page are what you want, a dedicated highlighter extension is the better fit. If the end product is a cited document, a library of attributed quotes is the more useful artifact.
Private by construction
The evidence library is stored locally in your browser. CiteRoam only touches the tab you invoke it on, requires no account, and uploads nothing you read or save.