Pandoc can automatically generate citations and a bibliography in a number of styles. In order to use this feature, you will need to specify a bibliography file using the bibliography metadata field in a YAML metadata section. For example:

The bibliography may have any of these formats:

Format

MODS

BibLaTeX

BibTeX

RIS

EndNote

EndNote XML

ISI

MEDLINE

Copac

JSON citeproc

Note that .bib can generally be used with both BibTeX and BibLaTeX files, but you can use .bibtex to force BibTeX.

Alternatively you can use a references field in the document’s YAML metadata. This should include an array of YAML-encoded references, for example:

Bibliographies will be placed at the end of the document. Normally, you will want to end your document with an appropriate header:

The bibliography will be inserted after this header.

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. Here are some examples:

A minus sign (-) before the @ will suppress mention of the author in the citation. This can be useful when the author is already mentioned in the text:

You can also write an in-text citation, as follows:

If you want to include items in the bibliography without actually citing them in the body text, you can define a dummynocite metadata field and put the citations there:

In this example, the document will contain a citation for item3 only, but the bibliography will contain entries foritem1, item2, and item3.

By default, pandoc will use a Chicago author-date format for citations and references. To use another style, you will need to specify a CSL 1.0 style file in the csl metadata field. For example:

A primer on creating and modifying CSL styles can be found at http://citationstyles.org/downloads/primer.html. A repository of CSL styles can be found at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles. See alsohttp://zotero.org/styles for easy browsing.

By default, citations are generated by the utility pandoc-citeproc, and it works for all output formats. When the output is LaTeX/PDF, you can also use LaTeX packages (e.g. natbib) to generate citations; see [PDF documents] for details.