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.

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.

Some other sites, like physics or maths, would probably also benefit from functionality like this.