Citations and Footnotes

March 31, 2026 · View on GitHub

Quarto uses Pandoc's citation system with support for BibTeX, CSL styles, and flexible citation formatting.

Citation Syntax

Basic Citations

According to @smith2020, the results indicate...
The study showed significant results [@smith2020].

Variations

Syntax	Output
`@smith2020`	Smith (2020)
`[@smith2020]`	(Smith 2020)
`[-@smith2020]`	(2020) - author suppressed
`@Smith2020 [p. 10]`	Smith (2020, p. 10)
`[@smith2020, p. 10]`	(Smith 2020, p. 10)

Multiple Citations

Several studies [@smith2020; @jones2021] found...
[@smith2020; @jones2021; @williams2022]

Citation with Locators

@smith2020 [p. 33]
@smith2020 [chap. 2]
[@smith2020, pp. 10-15]
[@smith2020, fig. 3]

Common locators: p., pp., chap., sec., fig., eq., vol..

In-Text vs Parenthetical

@smith2020 says... → Smith (2020) says...
As shown by @smith2020... → As shown by Smith (2020)...
The results [@smith2020]... → The results (Smith 2020)...

Prefix and Suffix

[see @smith2020, pp. 10-15, for discussion]
→ (see Smith 2020, pp. 10-15, for discussion)

Bibliography Configuration

Basic Setup

bibliography: references.bib

Multiple Files

bibliography:
  - references.bib
  - additional.bib

BibTeX File Example

@article{smith2020,
  author = {Smith, John},
  title = {Article Title},
  journal = {Journal Name},
  year = {2020},
  volume = {10},
  pages = {1-20}
}

@book{jones2021,
  author = {Jones, Sarah},
  title = {Book Title},
  publisher = {Publisher},
  year = {2021}
}

Other Formats

Quarto supports:

BibTeX (.bib)
BibLaTeX (.bib)
CSL JSON (.json)
CSL YAML (.yaml)

Citation Styles (CSL)

Specify CSL File

bibliography: references.bib
csl: apa.csl

Find CSL Files

Common Styles

csl: apa.csl           # APA 7th edition
csl: chicago-author-date.csl
csl: ieee.csl
csl: nature.csl
csl: vancouver.csl

Bibliography Placement

By default, bibliography appears at end. Control placement:

## References

::: {#refs}
:::

## Appendix

Additional content after references.

Suppress Bibliography

suppress-bibliography: true

Footnotes

Inline Footnotes

This is text with a footnote.^[This is the footnote content.]

Reference Footnotes

This is text with a footnote.[^1]

[^1]: This is the footnote content.

Multi-Paragraph Footnotes

[^longnote]: This is a long footnote.

    It has multiple paragraphs.

    And can include code:

    ```{.r}
    x <- 1
    ```

Citation Methods

Citeproc (Default)

Standard Pandoc citation processing:

bibliography: references.bib

BibLaTeX (PDF)

bibliography: references.bib
format:
  pdf:
    cite-method: biblatex

Natbib (PDF)

bibliography: references.bib
format:
  pdf:
    cite-method: natbib

Reference Section Title

reference-section-title: "References"

Or for other languages:

lang: de
reference-section-title: "Literaturverzeichnis"

Citation Links

Control hyperlinking:

link-citations: true # Link in-text to bibliography
link-bibliography: true # Link URLs in bibliography

Citation Processing Options

citeproc: true # Enable citation processing
citation-abbreviations: abbrev.json # Journal abbreviations
notes-after-punctuation: true

DOI and URL Handling

format:
  html:
    citations:
      link-citations: true
  pdf:
    include-in-header:
      - text: |
          \usepackage{hyperref}

Footnote Location

Control where footnotes appear:

reference-location: document   # End of document
reference-location: section    # End of section
reference-location: block      # End of block
reference-location: margin     # In margin (if supported)

Citation Hover (HTML)

Enable hover previews:

format:
  html:
    citation-hover: true

Author-Date vs Numeric

Controlled by CSL style:

# Author-date style
csl: apa.csl

# Numeric style
csl: ieee.csl

Citing Software

@software{tidyverse,
  author = {Wickham, Hadley},
  title = {tidyverse: Easily Install and Load the 'Tidyverse'},
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidyverse}
}

Or use @Manual for R packages.