Citations
Overview
Quarto will use Pandoc to automatically generate citations and a bibliography in a number of styles. To use this capability, you will need:
A quarto document formatted with citations (see Citation Markdown).
A bibliographic data source, for example a BibLaTeX (
.bib) or BibTeX (.bibtex) file.Optionally, a
CSLfile which specifies the formatting to use when generating the citations and bibliography (when not usingnatbiborbiblatexto generate the bibliography).
When using format: typst, by default citation processing is handled by Typst, not Pandoc. See the Typst section below for more details.
Bibliography Files
Quarto supports bibliography files in a wide variety of formats including BibLaTeX and CSL. Add a bibliography to your document using the bibliography YAML metadata field. For example:
---
title: "My Document"
bibliography: references.bib
---You can provide more than one bibliography file if you would like by setting the bibliography field’s value to a YAML array.
See the Pandoc Citations documentation for additional information on bibliography formats.
Citation Syntax
Quarto uses the standard Pandoc markdown representation for citations (e.g. [@citation]) — citations go inside square brackets and are separated by semicolons. Each citation must have a key, composed of ‘@’ + the citation identifier from the database, and may optionally have a prefix, a locator, and a suffix. The citation key must begin with a letter, digit, or _, and may contain alphanumerics, _, and internal punctuation characters (:.#$%&-+?<>~/). Here are some examples:
| Markdown Format | Output (default) | Output(csl: diabetologia.csl, see Section 4) |
|---|---|---|
|
Blah Blah (see Knuth 1984, 33–35; also Wickham 2015, chap. 1) | Blah Blah see [1], pp. 33-35; also [1], chap. 1 |
|
Blah Blah (Knuth 1984, 33–35, 38–39 and passim) | Blah Blah [1], pp. 33-35, 38-39 and passim |
|
Blah Blah (Wickham 2015; Knuth 1984). | Blah Blah [1, 2]. |
|
Wickham says blah (2015) | Wickham says blah [1] |
You can also write in-text citations, as follows:
| Markdown Format | Output (author-date format) | Output (numerical format) |
|---|---|---|
|
Knuth (1984) says blah. | [1] says blah. |
|
Knuth (1984, 33) says blah. | [1] [p. 33] says blah. |
See the Pandoc Citations documentation for additional information on citation syntax.
Citation Style
Quarto uses Pandoc to format citations and bibliographies. By default, Pandoc will use the Chicago Manual of Style author-date format, but you can specify a custom formatting using CSL (Citation Style Language). To provide a custom citation stylesheet, provide a path to a CSL file using the csl metadata field in your document, for example:
---
title: "My Document"
bibliography: references.bib
csl: nature.csl
---You can find CSL files or learn more about using styles at the CSL Project. You can browse the list of more than 8,500 Creative Commons CSL definitions in the CSL Project’s central repository or Zotero’s style repository.
CSL styling is only available when the cite-method is citeproc (which it is by default). If you are using another cite-method, you can control the formatting of the references using the mechanism provided by that method.
Bibliography Generation
By default, Pandoc will automatically generate a list of works cited and place it in the document if the style calls for it. It will be placed in a div with the id refs if one exists:
### References
::: {#refs}
:::If no such div is found, the works cited list will be placed at the end of the document.
You can suppress generation of a bibliography by including suppress-bibliography: true option in your document metadata
Here’s an example of a generated bibliography:
Including Uncited Items
If you want to include items in the bibliography without actually citing them in the body text, you can define a dummy nocite metadata field and put the citations there:
---
nocite: |
@item1, @item2
---
@item3In this example, the document will contain a citation for item3 only, but the bibliography will contain entries for item1, item2, and item3.
It is possible to create a bibliography with all the citations, whether or not they appear in the document, by using a wildcard:
---
nocite: |
@*
---LaTeX: using BibLaTeX or natbib
When creating PDFs, you can choose to use either the default Pandoc citation handling based on citeproc, or alternatively use natbib or BibLaTeX. This can be controlled using the cite-method option. For example:
format:
pdf:
cite-method: biblatexThe default is to use citeproc (Pandoc’s built in citation processor).
See the main article on using Citations with Quarto for additional details on citation syntax, available bibliography formats, etc.
Options
When using natbib or biblatex you can specify the following additional options to affect how bibliographies are rendered:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| biblatexoptions | List of options for biblatex |
| natbiboptions | List of options for natbib |
| biblio-title | Title for bibliography |
| biblio-style | Style for bibliography |
Typst
Typst comes with its own citation processing system for bibliographies and using format: typst defaults to it. To specify a bibliography style using Typst’s system, use the bibliographystyle option. Provide a string from Typst’s list of built-in styles, e.g.:
bibliography: refs.bib
bibliographystyle: apaOr alternatively, provide a path to a local CSL file:
bibliography: refs.bib
bibliographystyle: my-csl-style.cslIf you prefer to use Pandoc’s citation processing, set citeproc: true explicitly in YAML header:
citeproc: true
bibliography: refs.bib
csl: https://www.zotero.org/styles/apa-with-abstractTo provide a citation style file to Pandoc’s citation processing system use the csl option, as described in Citation Style.