I would also like to see this feature and have asked the MN team for it before. I would disagree with @happycatmachine that “it would take a lot of work”. I submit that in fact it should be quite easy for MN to support automatic references and citations, if the MN team felt it was a priority. As I see it, the issue is not that “it would take a lot of work” but simply that MN doesn’t see it as important.
To support my claim that it should be easy to add this, I would draw your attention to the database that MN uses to store notes. It’s a typical, industry-standard SQL database — nothing unusual. You can examine it with free tools. Each note is represented by a row in the ZBOOKNOTE table, and each book or article is represented by a row in the ZBOOK table. Every book and every note have a unique ID, which is used to associate notes with books and vice versa.
In this way, MN can make simple queries to get all the notes that belong to a book, and the book/article that owns any given note. It does this by querying for matching IDs (internally, MD5 hashes). This is what MN already does, and is the purppose of using a SQL database in the first place.
Now, each ZBOOK also has a ZAUTHOR, which contains the author’s name. Again, this functionality is already in place. This is retrieved from the PDF metadata when you import your PDF into MN. So, for each note in your mindmap, MN can fetch the author’s name as it appears in the PDF, using the following SQL expression:
select ZAUTHOR from ZBOOK where ZMD5LONG = [Insert ZBOOKMD5 value from ZBOOKNOTE];
That’s all that is needed to get the author’s name for a note. One line of SQL.
For anybody doing academic research, this feature is obviously quite important (as, I should add, are displaying correct page numbers for sources). Given that this feature could be added easily, the question is: why don’t they do it?
I can only speculate, but my sense is that the MN team hasn’t really understood the usual academic workflow for research, and mainly view MN as a tool for student exam prep.