Citation Style Language
The Citation Style Language is an open XML file format that describes schema for the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion system also supports citations in CSL, YAML, and JSON formats and can render these using any of the CSL styles listed in the Zotero Style Repository.
History
CSL was created by Bruce D'Arcus for use with OpenOffice.org, and an XSLT-based "CiteProc" CSL processor. CSL was further developed in collaboration with Zotero developer Simon Kornblith. Since 2008, the core development team consists of D'Arcus, Frank Bennett, Rintze Zelle, Brenton Wiernik and Denis Maier.The releases of CSL are 0.8, 0.8.1, 1.0, 1.0.1, and 1.0.2. CSL 1.0 was a backward-incompatible release, but styles in the 0.8.1 format can be automatically updated to the CSL 1.0 format.
On its release in 2006, Zotero became the first application to adopt CSL. In 2008 Mendeley was released with CSL support, and in 2011, Papers and Qiqqa gained support for CSL-based citation formatting.
Software support
- Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, and Qiqqa all support CSL 1.0.
- Zotero, Mendeley, and Qiqqa rely on the citeproc-js JavaScript CSL processor.
- Zotero, Mendeley, and Qiqqa provide a built-in CSL editor to help create and modify CSL styles.