I’ll just add that I agree with the comments by @MAB941009 and @Spoon, above. There are some very good citation management apps out there (Bookends is especially impressive), and it’s not necessary for MarginNote to duplicate their behavior.
But as it stands today, MarginNote does not provide adequate support for academic use.
I think @MAB941009 has offered an excellent suggestion for how to implement this, without getting into all the details of citation management. As I understand it, this suggestion would require several new columns added to the ZBOOK table, and a simple UI to edit them. What @Spoon suggested, above, is a more minimal approach. Either would be an improvement, and it depends on the extent to which the MN team chooses to support academic users.
Again these suggestions do not strike me as very complicated code changes, but they would make a very big difference for academic use.
EDIT: Hello, @Support-Team, I want to amplify one other thing that @MAB941009 said, above:
This is worth emphasizing, because as it stands today, I cannot recommend MarginNote to any of my students or academic colleagues. Repeat: I cannot and do not recommend or even mention MarginNote. There are three simple reasons for this:
First: MarginNote does not provide adequate support for academic research and writing. To clarify, I am not talking about my personal workflow, I am talking about the standard academic practice of using and citing published sources. To be clear, the standard practice is: the authors’ names, the titles of their articles/books, and page numbers of the academic sources must be cited clearly. For this, this information needs to be available as part of each quotation from a text. MarginNote could do this, as others in this thread have pointed out.
But at present, MarginNote doesn’t do this. It also doesn’t handle PDF page numbers correctly.
Second, MarginNote doesn’t provide adequate support for search and export of notes. It’s not necessary to explain this issue, as there are already many posts on this forum describing the problems, and giving very clear, detailed proposals for how to fix them. Evidently, this is not a priority for the MN team, from which I draw the obvious conclusion: the MarginNote team is not serious about supporting academic researchers/writers.
The third reason is that the level of technical support for MarginNote is substandard. Issues get lost. Posts and requests on this forum go unanswered for days/weeks/months. In this thread, for example, 11 days have passed since there was a message from MN support. When support does respond, it’s generally “I’ve told the developer about this; no promises; maybe we’ll fix it, someday, maybe,” etc.
Together, these three problems are an absolute, total deal-breaker, and thus I cannot recommend MarginNote to any of my students or academic colleagues.
Fix these three issues, and I will gladly recommend MarginNote to others in the future.