How to Copy Citations when Chat GPT Lists Several as a "widget"

 Different question. In your work above, you often give 2, 3, or 4 citations together. 

 In the Chatgpt.com webpage, I can click to "advance" to the 2nd, 3rd, etc, citation. 

However, when I use the COPY function and paste in to MS WORD or a BLOG, I only get the first citation (of any series). ??

ChatGPT said:

Yes — and you’ve noticed something real and a bit annoying.
Here’s what’s happening under the hood:

---

🧩 1. Why you only get the first citation when copying

When you copy text from ChatGPT’s web interface, only the visible part of the citation cluster (the first link) is actually copied.
The numbered bracket like “ ” is a rendered widget, not literal text. It’s interactive HTML code that expands to multiple sources only inside the chat UI.

When you paste into Word, email, or your blog:

• The invisible part (2nd, 3rd, etc.) isn’t exported because the multi-citation block is stored as a single structured element, not plain text.

• Word sees only the first hyperlink and ignores the rest.

So you’re not missing anything — the copy function currently doesn’t flatten those composite citations.

---

🧰 2. Workarounds

There are a few ways to keep all the sources:

Option A – Expand manually before copying
Click through the small citation number in the chat, which opens the list of all sources (on the right or in a pop-up).
Then manually copy each link’s URL and paste them inline or as a footnote in Word.

Option B – Ask me to export them in plain text
You can say something like:

“List all the citation URLs in plain text for copy/paste.”
Then I’ll print:

[1] FDA Warning Letter: https://www.thefdalawblog.com/...
[2] SEC Filing: https://www.sec.gov/...
[3] ABC News Report: https://abcnews.go.com/...

That text will copy cleanly anywhere.

Option C – Use the ‘Share’ feature
If you click Share → Copy Link at the top of the chat, the shared web version preserves the clickable multi-citation formatting online — but not in Word.

---

🧠 3. Why OpenAI designed it this way

It’s partly a UX and partly a data-integrity choice:

• They wanted compact, readable brackets (like academic footnotes) in chat.

• But preserving multiple layered citations in plain-text export would create messy duplication.

• So only the first source is copied, assuming casual use.

For serious citation use (like your Discoveries in Health Policy blog), the best method is to have me list sources explicitly in text form before you copy.