Trace watches for one thing only — the moment you copy. It captures the source, writes the citation, and builds your bibliography while you work. No clicks, no forms, no 11pm reconstruction job.
Every citation extension asks you to stop reading and press its button. But when you're deep in a source, you're not thinking about referencing — you're thinking. So the click doesn't happen, and days later you're reverse-engineering a bibliography from your browser history.
Read → remember the extension exists → click the icon → check the fields → save → repeat for thirty sources → miss half of them.
Copy. That's it. The moment you hit ⌘C, you've already told Trace this source matters — so it's already in your bibliography.
Select text on any page and copy it. Trace reads the page's own metadata — author, date, publication, DOI — right there in your browser.
A quiet chip confirms it. The exact passage, the full citation, and the surrounding context all land in your ledger. Undo with one click.
Your clipboard carries an invisible source tag. Copy a formatted quote with its in-text citation, or the whole bibliography — italics, hanging indents and all — straight into Word or Docs.
One page listing every quoted passage in your work, its source, when you captured it, and what the page said at that moment. Attach it to an essay as proof of process, or to an article as a fact-checking record.
Turn it on and a paste into Word, Docs or Notes arrives already attributed — a superscript link, an in-text citation, or the passage in quote marks with its reference. Terminals, address bars and code editors always get exactly what you copied, and Ctrl+Shift+V pastes clean any time you want it plain.
Pages change and links rot. One click re-checks any quote against the live page — verified, changed, or unreachable — before you submit or publish.
APA 7, MLA 9, Harvard and Chicago, applied to your whole ledger instantly. Rich-text copy keeps the italics and hanging indents intact when you paste.
Set an assignment as active and every capture lands in it — the chip shows where, one click to switch. Come back after a break and Trace checks it's still the right one. Unassigned captures wait in your Inbox; per-project bibliographies and receipts come free.
So the architecture is the promise. Trace is local-first by design — there is no server to send your research to.
Captures live in your browser's local storage. No account, no sync, no upload. Export is a file you download yourself.
The only time Trace touches the network is when you press Verify — it re-fetches that single page to check your quote, and nothing else.
Some free citation extensions quietly use your idle bandwidth to crowdsource data collection. Trace never will, on any plan, at any price. It's in the licence.
No subscription, no account, no tiers to decipher. Try it free while you finish a piece of work, then pay once and it's yours — on every machine you use, for good.
Site licences with managed deployment, house citation styles, and receipt review for teachers and editors. One key, every device, no student accounts.
Talk to usTrace runs a listener that fires only on the copy shortcut, only for selections longer than a few words, and never on sites you've excluded. What it captures is exactly what you copied plus the page's public metadata — and it stays on your device.
Trace falls back sensibly — the organisation becomes the author, the citation is marked "n.d." where the date is missing, and you can edit any field in the ledger. Scholarly pages with citation metadata (most journals) come through with volume, issue, pages and DOI intact.
It's the opposite, and better. A plagiarism report is an accusation generated after the fact. A receipt is evidence you create as you work — every quoted passage, its source, and the moment you captured it. It doesn't say "trust me," it shows the work.
Everything, permanently. There's no subscription and no higher tier holding features back. You can use Trace free while you finish your first piece of work; after that a one-off key unlocks bibliographies and receipts. Capture never stops, trial or not — your sources are always yours, and you're paying to get them out, not to keep them.
Your key is checked on your own device, by the extension, offline. There is no licence server to call — which is also why there's no account to create, nothing to log into, and nothing about you for us to hold.
Anywhere that accepts rich text receives the invisible source tag — Word, Notion, most web editors. Google Docs support ships as a companion add-on. Plain-text targets still work: your ledger holds the passage, so the quote-with-citation is one click away.