Citations

Format bibliography entries and in-text citations in over 2,000 journal styles.

Two different things called "citation"

This endpoint produces formatted citations for a bibliography. The Citation object that tells you where a generated claim came from is a different type entirely.

Endpoints

Method	Path	Scope	Description
POST	`/v1/citations`	`citations:write`	Format a citation
GET	`/v1/citation-styles`	`citations:read`	List/search styles
GET	`/v1/citation-styles/{id}`	`citations:read`	Retrieve a style

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`style`	string	yes	Style ID or slug, e.g. `apa`
`source.paper_id`	string	one of	A corpus paper
`source.doi`	string	one of	A DOI to resolve
`source.csl`	object	one of	CSL-JSON you supply

Accepting CSL-JSON directly means any reference manager's export can be formatted without a lookup.

Response

json

{ "object": "citation_entry", "id": "cite_uny8c7z4za",
  "style": { "id": "cstl_28t1c", "slug": "apa", "name": "American Psychological Association 7th edition",
             "is_numeric": false },
  "bibliography_text": "Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. NeurIPS.",
  "bibliography_html": "<div class=\"csl-entry\">…</div>",
  "in_text": "(Vaswani et al., 2017)" }

Plain text and HTML are both returned so callers are never forced to strip markup.

Listing styles

cURL

curl "https://api.scispace.com/v1/citation_styles?query=vancouver&limit=3" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCISPACE_API_KEY" \
  -H "SciSpace-Version: 2026-08-01"

json

{
  "object": "list",
  "data": [
    { "object": "citation_style", "id": "cstl_28t1c", "name": "Vancouver", "short_name": "vancouver", "category": "numeric" },
    { "object": "citation_style", "id": "cstl_9fk2d", "name": "Vancouver (superscript)", "short_name": "vancouver-superscript", "category": "numeric" },
    { "object": "citation_style", "id": "cstl_4b7ns", "name": "Vancouver (brackets)", "short_name": "vancouver-brackets", "category": "numeric" }
  ],
  "has_more": true,
  "next_cursor": "cstl_4b7ns"
}

The catalogue holds 2,000+ styles, so list with a query rather than paging the whole set. Omit query and you get every style, 100 per page, in alphabetical order.

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`query`	string	no	Case-insensitive match on `name` and `short_name`
`category`	enum	no	`numeric`, `author-date`, `note`, `label`
`limit`	integer	no	1–100, default 20
`cursor`	string	no	From `next_cursor`

Style IDs are stable

A cstl_ id always refers to the same style, so you can persist a user's choice. Style output tracks upstream CSL updates, so a re-render may differ in punctuation.

Errors

Status	`code`	When
404	`style_not_found`	unknown style
400	`csl_invalid`	malformed CSL-JSON
422	`insufficient_metadata`	not enough fields for this style

citation · papers · reference-manager-sync

Last updated 2026-08-10