Citation Style Language

The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers.

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 and Rintze Zelle.

The releases of CSL are 0.8 (March 21, 2009), 0.8.1 (February 1, 2010), 1.0 (March 22, 2010), and 1.0.1 (September 3, 2012). 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.

The CSL project maintains a CSL 1.0 style repository at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles, which contains over 6000 styles. These styles can be browsed and searched via the Zotero Style Repository.

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