One feature that I would like to see on this site would be some explicit support for citing scientific papers in the markdown syntax. In the simplest form this might be something like footnotes, in a more advanced form maybe some integration into Pubmed or similar databases.
Example: According to Nikolova et al.1 DNA can form transient Hogsteen base pairs ...
I know that we can achieve most of that by manually linking to the relevant articles. But I think an explicit option would encourage citing primary literature, which would improve the quality of this site. Manually creating a citation like my example is also a lot of work, it would be nice if the information could be automatically extracted given a Pubmed ID or by uploading/pasting a BibTex or RIS citation file.
An integration of DOI-linking could also be useful.
Some other sites, like physics or maths, would probably also benefit from functionality like this.
The code of the example citation in this post is
<sub>[\[1\] Nikolova et al., Transient Hoogsteen base pairs
in canonical duplex DNA, *Nature* **470**, 498-502 (2011)][4]</sub>
