Bibliographies and Citations

Specifying a Bibliography

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:

---
title: "Sample Document"
output: html_document
bibliography: bibliography.bib
---

The bibliography may have any of these formats:

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

Inline References

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

---
references:
- id: fenner2012a
  title: One-click science marketing
  author:
  - family: Fenner
    given: Martin
  container-title: Nature Materials
  volume: 11
  URL: 'http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat3283'
  DOI: 10.1038/nmat3283
  issue: 4
  publisher: Nature Publishing Group
  page: 261-263
  type: article-journal
  issued:
    year: 2012
    month: 3
---

Bibliography Placement

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

last paragraph...

# References

The bibliography will be inserted after this header.

Citation Syntax

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:

Blah blah [see @doe99, pp. 33-35; also @smith04, ch. 1].

Blah blah [@doe99, pp. 33-35, 38-39 and *passim*].

Blah blah [@smith04; @doe99].

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:

Smith says blah [-@smith04].

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

@smith04 says blah.

@smith04 [p. 33] says blah.

Unused References (nocite)

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
...

@item3

In this example, the document will contain a citation for item3 only, but the bibliography will contain entries for item1, item2, and item3.

Citation Styles

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:

---
title: "Sample Document"
output: html_document
bibliography: bibliography.bib
csl: biomed-central.csl
---

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 also http://zotero.org/styles for easy browsing.

Citations for PDF Output

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.