CiteProc

CiteProc is a family of software engines that implement the Citation Style Language (CSL). It formats citations and bibliographies according to CSL styles, enabling consistent scholarly formatting across applications. CSL styles encode rules for how different item types should be rendered, punctuation, ordering, locale conventions, and the layout of in-text citations and reference lists. CiteProc takes as input a set of bibliographic items, a CSL style, and a list of citations, and outputs formatted strings for citations and bibliographies.

A key feature of CiteProc is its support for both in-text citation formatting and full bibliographies, with configurable output that can follow numeric or author–date systems. The engines are designed to be embedded in various software environments, allowing publishers, journals, and tools to adapt formatting to specific style guides without manual editing.

Implementation and usage vary by language. The most widely used implementation is citeproc-js, a JavaScript library that runs in browsers and Node.js and is employed by several document-processing workflows. Other language bindings exist, including implementations for Ruby and Go, enabling use in diverse software stacks. In practice, CiteProc is integrated into word processors, reference managers, and document converters to render citations and bibliographies according to publisher or journal requirements.

Origin and scope: The CSL project aims to standardize scholarly citation formatting, and CiteProc engines are built to be compatible with the CSL specification and to support multiple locales and languages. The ecosystem is open source, with a community and a repository of CSL styles that cover a wide range of publishers and institutions. See also: Citation Style Language, Pandoc, Zotero.