Solas — Academic Research & Citations

Solas is a citation and source-evaluation tool for students, researchers, and academic writers. It produces accurate Harvard references from web pages, scholarly databases, and PDF documents, scores each source for reliability, and maintains an organised library of references and saved quotations — without leaving the page being read. Citation generation Solas uses an AI-led extraction pipeline that cross-references metadata against CrossRef, OpenAlex, Google Books, Open Library, and Companies House before producing the Harvard reference. Supported source types include: Journal articles, conference papers, and review articles Books, book chapters, and edited volumes Government reports and institutional white papers News articles, opinion pieces, and editorials Theses, dissertations, and working papers Pre-prints from arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and SSRN Recorded lectures and video talks Direct PDF documents, including those distributed without an HTML landing page The extractor handles authors with diacritics and multi-part surnames, suppresses publisher kicker prefixes from international press (Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, La Repubblica), disambiguates same-author / same-year references automatically, and resolves DOI-linked materials through multiple registries. Source reliability Every generated reference receives a reliability assessment based on four criteria — currency, relevance, authority, and accuracy. The evaluation cross-checks against peer-review indexing signals (Scopus, Web of Science), retraction records, recognised academic publisher registries, predatory journal databases, domain-level trust indicators (government, educational, central banks, statutory bodies, established research institutions), and open-access availability through Unpaywall. Where a source requires consideration — for example, an older foundational text being used in support of contemporary claims — Solas surfaces a contextual note explaining the concern. Quotation capture A keyboard shortcut saves any selected passage alongside its full Harvard reference. Saved quotations can be revisited from the library; clicking a quotation returns the user to its location in the original source. On standard web pages, the passage is highlighted in place. On PDF documents, a dedicated quote-spotlight surface provides single-keystroke navigation to the exact text. Library References are organised into up to ten user-defined projects, with in-place renaming, drag reordering, contextual actions, and a configurable sort order. The save flow is explicit: a citation is produced first, then assigned to its destination. Accessibility and interface Solas includes a colour-blind-safe palette (Wong, with shape and icon redundancy), an optional page-filter mode for low-vision users, three theme tones (light, grey, dark), and a configurable interface density. Visual hierarchy and interaction behaviour are designed in accordance with Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Operating environment A dedicated side panel and an unobtrusive in-page Glance bar provide the same functionality from any tab. A bundled PDF viewer wrapper extends Solas's citation features to PDF documents, which Chrome ordinarily renders in a sandboxed viewer that blocks extension functionality. Status Solas is currently available as a free research preview during beta. Feedback can be submitted through the in-app feedback channel. Privacy Policy: https://solastool.com/privacy Terms: https://solastool.com/terms Support: support@solastool.com