Format Citation
formatCitationGenerate paste-ready citations from scholarly identifiers (DOI, PMID, ISSN, arXiv) in any of 10,000+ styles, with Vancouver as default. Ideal for manuscripts, slides, and footnotes.
Instructions
Format scholarly identifiers into a finished citation in a specific style. Use when the user wants a paste-ready citation string for a manuscript, slide, message, footnote, or in-line reference. Style defaults to vancouver if unspecified; ask the user before defaulting if any ambiguity exists (e.g. 'Harvard' and 'Chicago' have multiple variants — confirm which one). Supports five hand-tuned builtins (vancouver, ama, apa, ieee, cse) plus any of 10,000+ CSL style IDs (chicago-author-date, harvard-cite-them-right, modern-language-association, nature, bmj, the-lancet, etc.). Alias and dependent-style resolution apply, so 'harvard' resolves to 'harvard-cite-them-right' and the canonical ID is reported back as styleUsed. Output defaults to text; pass output=html for marked-up HTML or output=json for structured CSL items. Accepts the same identifier formats as resolveIdentifier (DOI/PMID/PMCID/ISBN/arXiv/ISSN/ADS/WHO IRIS, prefixes tolerated), single or comma/newline-separated batch — one round trip per call. Returns: one of { text, html, items } depending on the output parameter, followed by a metadata block ({formatter: 'builtin' | 'csl', styleUsed, requestId, warnings?}) appended as a second text content item — surface this to the user when they care about reproducibility. Use resolveIdentifier instead when the user wants raw metadata to inspect or transform; use exportCitation when they want a downloadable bibliography file. Read-only and idempotent — safe to retry. Works anonymously against the public Scholar Sidekick API (rate-limited free tier); set SCHOLAR_API_KEY (a free ssk_ key from https://scholar-sidekick.com/account) for higher limits, or RAPIDAPI_KEY for paid RapidAPI tiers. Rate limits follow your tier.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| lang | No | BCP-47 locale tag for formatting (e.g. 'en-US', 'en-GB', 'fr-FR'). Defaults to the locale embedded in the chosen CSL style, typically en-US. | |
| text | Yes | One or more scholarly identifiers to process — DOI (with or without https://doi.org/), PMID (with or without 'PMID:' prefix), PMCID (e.g. PMC7793608), ISBN (10 or 13 digit, hyphens tolerated), arXiv ID (with or without 'arXiv:' prefix; old-style hep-ph/0501023 also accepted), ISSN, NASA ADS bibcode (19 chars), or WHO IRIS URL. Pass identifiers verbatim — do not strip prefixes. Multiple identifiers may be separated by newlines or commas; mixed types in one batch are supported and resolved in a single round trip. | |
| style | No | Citation style: 'vancouver' (default), 'ama', 'apa', 'ieee', 'cse', or any of 10,000+ CSL style IDs from citation-style-language/styles (e.g. 'chicago-author-date', 'harvard-cite-them-right', 'modern-language-association', 'nature', 'bmj', 'the-lancet'). Aliases and dependent styles resolve automatically — 'harvard' → 'harvard-cite-them-right'. | |
| output | No | Output format: 'text' (plain text, default), 'html' (marked-up HTML for web rendering), or 'json' (structured CSL items, equivalent to resolveIdentifier). | |
| footnote | No | When true, render as a footnote/note-style citation rather than a bibliography entry. Only meaningful for note-style CSL styles (chicago-note-bibliography, turabian-fullnote-bibliography); ignored by author-date and numeric styles. |