Citation Style Language

The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an XML-Based stylesheet language for formatting of citations and bibliographies. It is used in reference management software such as Zotero, Mendeley, CiteProc and Pandoc. CSL was initiated by Bruce D’Arcus in the XBib project. The CSL 1.0 specification was published in March 2010.

The idea behind CSL

If you know BibTeX you can compare CSL with the BibTeX style file language BAFLL (BibTeX Anonymous Forth-Like). If you know XSL than you can compare it with XSLT. The basic idea is to seperate bibliographic data and a citation styles that can be used to create nicely formatted citations.

                           CSL-Style
                               |
                               v
 Bibliographic record -> CSL-Processor -> Citation

CLS-Processors are available in different programming languages. The most elaborated CSL-Processor is citeproc-js.

Getting started

If you use a reference management software such as Zotero you already use CLS under the hood. If you want to dig your hands into code, have a look at citeproc-js:

 hg clone http://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js

Documentation is locatied in the manual directory or online at http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html

References

• http://CitationStyles.org - the home of the Citation Style Language (CSL)
• http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html - CSL 1.0 specification
• http://citationstyles.org/styles/ - the Zotero style repository contains hundreds of citation styles (maily in CSL 0.8)
• http://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js - citeproc-js
• http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/ - XBib project (no longer maintained)

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