aid: citation-cff name: Citation File Format url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/citation-cff/refs/heads/main/apis.yml created: '2025-01-01' modified: '2026-04-23' kind: standard access: Open position: Standard specificationVersion: '0.19' tags: - Academic - Citation - Metadata - Open Standard - Repository - Research - Software - YAML description: >- The Citation File Format (CFF) is a human- and machine-readable YAML schema for providing citation metadata for software and datasets in source code repositories. A CITATION.cff file at the root of a repository declares authors, version, DOI, release date, and reference metadata, enabling consistent academic attribution across publishing and discovery platforms. CFF is governed as an open community standard with a published JSON Schema, a guide, and a maintained schema repository on GitHub. Native integrations include GitHub citation display, Zenodo software publishing, and the Zotero browser plugin. Tooling includes cffinit for authoring, cffconvert for conversion to BibTeX/RIS/CodeMeta/EndNote formats, and the cff-validator GitHub Action for CI validation. The current schema version is 1.2.0. apis: - aid: citation-cff:cff-schema name: Citation File Format Schema tags: - JSON Schema - Schema - Validation - YAML image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg humanURL: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format properties: - url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/schema.json type: JSONSchema - url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/README.md type: Documentation - url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/schema-guide.md type: Schema Guide - url: https://citation-file-format.github.io/ type: Website - url: json-schema/citation-cff-schema.json type: JSONSchema description: >- The CFF schema defines the structure of a CITATION.cff file in YAML, including required cff-version, message, and authors fields plus optional version, doi, license, repository-code, preferred-citation, and references blocks. The current schema version is 1.2.0 and is published as JSON Schema in the citation-file-format GitHub repository under an open-source license. - aid: citation-cff:cffinit name: cffinit Authoring Tool tags: - Authoring - cffinit - Web App image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg humanURL: https://citation-file-format.github.io/cff-initializer-javascript/ properties: - url: https://citation-file-format.github.io/cff-initializer-javascript/ type: Web Application - url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/cff-initializer-javascript type: Source Code description: >- cffinit is a web-based form that walks software authors through creating a syntactically and semantically valid CITATION.cff file. It produces downloadable YAML and validates content against the CFF schema in real time. - aid: citation-cff:cffconvert name: cffconvert tags: - BibTeX - cffconvert - CodeMeta - Conversion - RIS image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg humanURL: https://github.com/citation-file-format/cffconvert properties: - url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/cffconvert type: Source Code - url: https://pypi.org/project/cffconvert/ type: Package description: >- cffconvert is a Python command-line tool and library that converts CITATION.cff files to APA plain text, BibTeX, CodeMeta, EndNote, RIS, schema.org JSON-LD, and Zenodo deposition JSON. It also validates CFF files against the published schema. - aid: citation-cff:cff-validator name: cff-validator GitHub Action tags: - CI - GitHub Action - Validation image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg humanURL: https://github.com/dieghernan/cff-validator properties: - url: https://github.com/dieghernan/cff-validator type: Source Code - url: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/cff-validator type: Marketplace description: >- The cff-validator GitHub Action runs schema validation on a repository's CITATION.cff during continuous integration so that malformed or non-compliant citation metadata is caught before release. - aid: citation-cff:github-citation-integration name: GitHub Native Citation Support tags: - Discovery - GitHub - Integration image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg humanURL: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-citation-files properties: - url: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-citation-files type: Documentation description: >- GitHub natively reads CITATION.cff files and renders a Cite this repository button on the repository landing page that generates BibTeX and APA snippets from the file's metadata. - aid: citation-cff:zenodo-integration name: Zenodo Software Publishing tags: - DOI - Publishing - Repository - Zenodo image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg humanURL: https://zenodo.org/ properties: - url: https://zenodo.org/ type: Documentation - url: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/referencing-and-citing-content type: Integration Documentation description: >- The GitHub-Zenodo integration uses CITATION.cff metadata when publishing a release as a citable software record. Zenodo assigns a DOI and populates the deposit form from the CFF file's authors, title, and version. common: - type: Website url: https://citation-file-format.github.io/ - type: Documentation url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format - type: Schema Guide url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/schema-guide.md - type: Schema url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/schema.json - type: GitHub url: https://github.com/citation-file-format - type: Governance url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/governance - type: Issues url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/issues - type: License url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/LICENSE - type: Citation url: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/CITATION.cff - type: JSONLD url: json-ld/citation-cff-context.jsonld - type: JSONSchema url: json-schema/citation-cff-schema.json - type: Spectral url: rules/citation-cff-rules.yml maintainers: - FN: Kin Lane email: kin@apievangelist.com