The Library

Every reference you cite, kept in full, and never allowed to rot.

Arf is not a reference manager competing with Zotero, and it does not ask you to abandon one. But a research-notes tool needs to hold the sources those notes are about, in detail, and to make citing them effortless. That is the Library: a browsable record of every reference in your work — journal articles, books, magazine and newspaper pieces, chapters, conference papers, preprints, datasets, theses, and web pages.

Fetched from open bibliographic sources

You add a reference in one of two ways. Search the databases by title, author, or keyword — Arf queries Crossref, Open Library, and Project Gutenberg (literary and philosophical texts) and shows a list of matches to pick from — or paste an identifier (a DOI, ISBN, or arXiv ID) and it fills in the title, authors, year, and venue directly from open, no-account sources:

Only the identifier you typed ever leaves your device — never your notes. A DOI or arXiv link works too; Arf reads the identifier out of it. Each reference records which source it came from, and you can correct any field by hand. If a lookup finds nothing, you add the reference and fill the details yourself.

Find it, then read it

A library is only useful if you can find the reference you half-remember. A search box over the whole library matches every field at once — author, title, year, venue, DOI, ISBN, even the abstract — with prefix and light fuzzy matching, so vasw, attention, or a fragment of a DOI all land on the paper you meant. References file into a nested folder tree, the same way your notes do: drag one onto a folder, or name a path like Physics/Quantum, and a folder you make ahead of the reference that will live in it stays put.

A reference can also carry the work itself. Attach a PDF, EPUB, or other reader file from your disk — or ask Arf to fetch an open-access copy where one exists. Discovery searches Unpaywall, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and Europe PMC, prefers a repository copy, and downloads it through a native path that isn't blocked by a publisher's cross-origin rules, so open-access PDFs from PLoS, Nature, and the like come down — not only arXiv preprints. A public-domain title from Project Gutenberg arrives as an EPUB. The file is saved in your vault, in an attachments/ folder beside your notes.

Open it in the side reader and write from it at the same time. A PDF opens as rendered pages — scroll and zoom (fit-width, − / +, or Ctrl-scroll) — and an EPUB as clean, reflowable text. Select a passage and quote it into the open note as a blockquote that carries the citation, or highlight the sentences you will come back to; highlights are saved beside your vault and travel with it, so they re-appear on another device. The source and your reading of it, on one page.

Cite as you write, export anywhere

Insert a citation without leaving the editor: the @ button opens a picker over your library and drops a [@citekey] at the cursor. In the reading view it renders as Author Year and jumps to the reference on click. From the same picker you choose where each citation appears — in the text and the reference list (the default), in the text only, or in the reference list only (a silent entry, like LaTeX's \nocite). Two works by one author in the same year are told apart automatically — Author 1981a, Author 1981b — and you can switch on an end-of-note bibliography in Settings, in the citation style you choose. When it is time to leave — to a manuscript, a co-author, or another tool — the Library exports to every format you are likely to need:

Import runs the same way in reverse, so an existing .bib or RIS file comes in cleanly.