How to Write a Paper with CiteGenie: A Three-Step Workflow

The three-step workflow

Most papers fall apart in the gaps between tasks. You read a stack of PDFs, then start writing days later and can no longer remember which paper said what. Or you draft a paragraph around a half-remembered claim, only to discover that the source you had in mind says something more cautious than you wrote. CiteGenie is designed to close those gaps by chaining three tools together.

The order matters. Reading first means your draft will be grounded in sources you actually understand. Verifying claims before drafting means you never end up writing a paragraph around a citation that does not say what you thought it said. Polishing last means you spend your editing time on prose, not on hunting for missing references.

Step 1: Digest readings with Reading Assistant

Open the Reading Assistant and upload the PDF you want to work through — a journal article, a textbook chapter, or a set of lecture notes. CiteGenie parses the reference list automatically and lets you click any in-text citation to jump straight to the cited source.

Why this step exists

The most common failure mode in undergraduate and early-graduate writing is "citation telephone": you read paper A, which cites paper B, which cites paper C — and you end up referencing C without ever having read it. Reading Assistant short-circuits that chain. When a passage in your reading hinges on a cited claim, you can verify the original source in one click rather than promising yourself you'll track it down later.

How to use it well

• Upload the actual PDF, not a screenshot. Reading Assistant needs structured text to parse the reference list.
• Highlight the in-text citations that matter to your argument, not every one. The goal is to verify the claims you might quote or paraphrase, not to chase every footnote.
• Take notes as you go. For each citation you verify, jot down the claim, the source, and one sentence on whether it actually supports the point the author is making. This becomes the spine of your literature notes.

Step 2: Research and verify sources with Find Source

Once you know what you want to argue, you will have claims that need a citation but no source attached yet. That is what Find Source is for. Paste the sentence — or even a rough draft of it — and CiteGenie searches Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, OpenAlex, and PubMed in parallel, then ranks the most relevant papers it finds.

What to paste

Find Source works best on a specific factual or theoretical claim, not a whole paragraph. Compare:

The second sentence names a phenomenon (short-form video), an outcome (sustained attention), and a population (adolescents). Each of those becomes a search term, and the matching papers will be much closer to what you actually want to cite.

Verify before you cite

Every paper Find Source returns is a candidate, not a verdict. Before you cite one, do three things:

1. Read the abstract. Confirm the paper actually studies what your claim describes.
2. Check the methods. A correlational survey supports a different kind of claim than a randomised experiment. Match the strength of your claim to the strength of the evidence.
3. Look at the venue and date. Peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings are usually safer than preprints; recent work matters in fast-moving fields.

If a candidate paper does not survive those three checks, do not cite it. Run Find Source again with a tighter sentence, or fall back to a broader search in Google Scholar.

Step 3: Generate a draft with Writing Assistant

With your readings digested and your sources in hand, the Writing Assistant takes over the heavy lifting of drafting. It is not a grammar checker, and it does not try to re-check your sources — that work was done in Step 2. You give it three things — a structure, the claims you want each section to make, and the citations that support those claims — and it generates a high-quality draft of the paper. From there, you steer it interactively: rewrite a paragraph, tighten a transition, push back on a claim, or ask it to bring in a citation you forgot.

The three inputs that produce a good draft

The quality of the output is determined almost entirely by the quality of the inputs. Spend the time on these three:

1. Structure. A flat list of sections and subsections — what each section is for, what comes before and after. For an essay, this might be three body sections; for an empirical paper, IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion).
2. Claims. One or two sentences per section saying what that section is supposed to argue. Not a topic ("attention and short-form video"), but a position ("the cross-sectional evidence is consistent but small, and the experimental evidence is mixed").
3. Supporting citations. The papers from Step 2, attached to the specific claim each one supports. A citation without a claim is decoration; a claim without a citation is opinion.

Drafting is a conversation, not a one-shot

Once Writing Assistant produces a first draft, the interactive part begins. Treat it like a co-author who has read your sources and is waiting for direction. Useful moves:

• "Rewrite this paragraph to lead with the claim." Forces topic sentences instead of source-by-source summaries.
• "Strengthen the contrast between Okafor and Lee & Park." Turns parallel descriptions into argued comparison.
• "This sentence overstates the evidence — soften it to match a correlational study." Keeps your claims sized to what the citations can actually support.
• "Add a transition into the next section on long-term effects." Smooths the structural seams the first pass almost always leaves rough.
• "Pull in Hassan & Kim (2025) here as a longitudinal counterpoint." Surgically inserts a citation you want where you want it.

What you still own

Writing Assistant drafts and revises; it does not decide what your paper argues. The structure, the claims, and the choice of which sources to trust are yours. Those are exactly the parts of writing that determine whether the paper says something — which is why the first two steps of this workflow matter so much. Garbage structure plus vague claims plus shaky citations will produce a fluent but empty draft, no matter how good the model is.

A worked example

Suppose you are writing a 2,000-word essay arguing that current evidence on short-form video and adolescent attention is weaker than popular discourse suggests. Here is what the workflow looks like end to end.

1. Read. You open three review articles in Reading Assistant. As you read, you click through every citation that supports a strong causal claim, and you discover that most of those claims trace back to cross-sectional surveys, not experiments. You jot down those source-level notes paper by paper.
2. Research. You decide your argument hinges on three specific claims: (a) effects in cross-sectional studies are small, (b) experimental studies often report null effects, and (c) the long-term picture is unclear. You paste each claim into Find Source and verify the strongest candidate paper for each.
3. Write. You hand Writing Assistant a one-page brief: intro + three body sections + conclusion, with a one-sentence claim and the supporting citations attached to each section. It produces a full draft. You then go back through it interactively — asking it to lead each body paragraph with its claim, sharpen the contrast between the cross-sectional and experimental evidence, and soften a sentence that overstated a correlation as causation.

At the end, every citation in your essay is a paper you have read at least the abstract and methods of, supporting a claim you can defend. That is the point of the workflow.

Tips for getting more out of each tool

Keep one document of running notes

As you move between Reading Assistant and Find Source, paste short notes into a single document — one line per source, with the full citation and a one-sentence summary of what it supports. When you get to drafting, this document is your map.

Match the strength of your claim to the strength of the evidence

A correlational study supports "is associated with"; a randomised experiment supports "causes". Reading Assistant and Find Source both make it easy to check which kind of evidence you are about to cite. Use that information when you write the sentence.

Treat Writing Assistant as a co-author, not an oracle

The best drafts come from short, specific instructions — "lead with the claim", "tighten this transition", "add Okafor as a counterpoint" — rather than one giant prompt. Read what it produces, push back where it overstates or wanders, and keep iterating until the section sounds like the paper you wanted to write.

Generate citations only after the draft is stable

Once your paragraphs are settled and the sources are verified, use the Citation Generator to format each reference in the style you need (APA, MLA, Chicago, ACS, AMA, Optica, IEEE, and more). Doing this last avoids reformatting the same entry three times as your reference list shifts.

Quick summary

A paper written this way is not magically faster to write — but it is a paper where every citation is grounded, every claim is sized to its evidence, and the editing time goes into prose instead of into chasing missing references. That is the whole point of using CiteGenie end to end.