I think grabbing citations is more complicated than @mobo stated. If the article is in a journal and I’m using Harvard notation then I need the page numbers in the journal that the article was in. I believe (I’m not certain) that this information isn’t stored in the paper itself. I could be wrong here and I’d be happy to be corrected.
Also, I tend to trim my enormous textbook pdfs to the chapters I need for study. I’m wondering how, without me having to enter the information anyway, MN is supposed to get bibliographic information for trimmed sources. There would have to be an interface that would allow me to enter such information.
There are UX issues, workflow issues, and issues I can’t even imagine without putting time into trying to imagine them to add such a feature. I’ve worked in software for 25 years as of 4 years ago and I can say adding even the smallest features often involved more work than was immediately apparent.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to hear that it is ‘easy’ from the developers and that they’ve already done the groundwork needed to support such a feature but from what I’ve seen in this thread alone, it appears not much thought has gone into it.
Zotero is free and it just works, I grab citations as I work whether I need them or not down the road, that way the leg work is done. Page numbers can be a chore but it’s a chore made much easier by making a note of the page numbers in the excerpts as I make them should I decide that I need to do that for the project I’m working on.
And @Spoon, I agree completely that it would be FAR more useful than the developers are letting on. I’m a first year student and am already having to cite, cite, cite everything I write. It would be SUPER useful to have the feature and I do hope to see it sometime before I graduate