Get email notifications whenever one of your papers is cited by a new work.
Want to try it out? Visit citey.email
Citey lets researchers track citations to their published papers. Add a paper by DOI, and Citey will notify you by email whenever a new citation is detected. Citation data is sourced from OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and Crossref, giving broad coverage across disciplines and publishers.
You can also bulk-import your entire publication list by searching for your author profile — by name (queried in parallel across OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar) or by entering a paper DOI to find co-authors. Citey handles duplicate detection and merge prompts if the same author appears under multiple profiles.
Next.js — React framework powering the entire frontend. Built with the App Router, TypeScript, and server/client component separation.
Tailwind CSS — Utility-first CSS framework used for all styling and layout throughout the app.
Framer Motion — Handles UI animations, including scroll reveals, transitions, and interactive card effects.
Firebase Authentication — Manages user sign-up, sign-in, and email verification. Passwords are hashed and stored entirely within Firebase — the application never handles raw credentials.
Vercel — Hosts and deploys the Next.js frontend. Provides automatic deployments on every push and global CDN delivery.
FastAPI — Python web framework serving the REST API. Handles all business logic: tracking works, querying citation sources, writing notifications, and triggering email delivery.
Firebase Firestore — NoSQL cloud database storing user profiles, tracked works, and citation notifications. Each user's data lives under a users/{uid} document with subcollections for works and notifications.
Firebase Admin SDK — Used server-side to verify user identity tokens on every API request and to manage user account data without exposing credentials to the client.
Resend — Transactional email provider used to deliver citation notification emails and digest summaries. Emails are rendered from Jinja2 HTML templates and sent via the Resend Python SDK.
APScheduler — In-process job scheduler that runs the citation check job on a recurring schedule, querying OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar for new citing papers.
Render — Hosts the FastAPI backend as a web service. A separate Render Cron job hits the /jobs/run endpoint on a schedule to trigger citation checks without keeping the scheduler process alive indefinitely.
OpenAlex — Primary citation data source. An open, comprehensive index of scholarly works used to resolve DOIs to paper metadata and fetch lists of citing papers.
Crossref — Used for DOI resolution and metadata enrichment. Crossref maintains the canonical DOI registry for academic publishing, making it reliable for identifying and validating papers.
Semantic Scholar — Secondary citation source used alongside OpenAlex to broaden coverage across disciplines. Also powers the paper-DOI author lookup (finding a paper's co-authors by DOI) and is queried in parallel with OpenAlex during author name searches for the bulk-import feature.