Microsoft wants to make it easier for students to add citations to their research papers with a new feature for the Edge browser. Adding proper citations to a paper can be a nightmare, especially with the different formats used in different institutions. The goal with citations in Microsoft Edge is to make that easier by allowing users to easily grab citations for a particular page.

The citations feature in Edge is tied to the Collections, which allow you to save groups of pages to reference later. The idea is that students will use collections to save a series of pages they used for research in their work, and then they can easily grab citations from those pages.

You'll need to enable citations in the Collections menu in Edge, and once that's done, you'll see a quotation mark symbol next to each page in a collection. This lets you choose both in-text and full citations, you can choose the type of source you're using, and change the author of the work you're citing. You can also choose the style you're working with, such as APA or MLA.

The feature is currently available in preview, and you'll need to be using either Dev or Canary builds of Edge to see it. You'll also need to be running Edge version 95 or newer, but that should be a given considering Edge 95 is already in the stable channel. Microsoft says that automatic citations in Edge are only available in certain academic websites for now. For websites where Edge can't grab all the information automatically, you can manually add information like the author to generate the appropriate citation.

To address any concerns users might have about the performance impact of this feature, Microsoft says the files needed for the citation feature are only downloaded when you first use it. If you don't need citations, you'll never download those files, and the browser will remain as lightweight as before. If you are interested in trying it out, you can download the latest Edge Insider builds or you can wait until citations are available in stable builds.