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.
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CSL was created by Bruce D'Arcus for use with OpenOffice,[1][2] and an XSLT-based "CiteProc" CSL processor. CSL was further developed in collaboration with Zotero developer Simon Kornblith. First released in 2006, Zotero became the first application to adopt CSL. Members of the Zotero user community subsequently contributed the majority of currently available CSL styles. In 2008 Mendeley was released with CSL support, and in 2011, Papers and Qiqqa gained support for CSL-based citation formatting.
The releases of CSL are 0.8 (March 21, 2009), 0.8.1 (February 1, 2010) and 1.0 (March 22, 2010). CSL 1.0, developed by D'Arcus, Frank Bennett and Rintze Zelle, is a backward-incompatible release.
Zotero, Mendeley, Papers and Qiqqa all support CSL 1.0 (Zotero also supports CSL 0.8.1 styles, which are internally updated to CSL 1.0). Zotero, Mendeley and Qiqqa rely on the citeproc-js JavaScript CSL processor. CSL 1.0 processors have also been written in Haskell (citeproc-hs), PHP, Python, and Ruby.[3]
The CSL project maintains a CSL 1.0 style repository at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles, which contains over 1700 styles. These styles can be browsed and searched via the Zotero Style Repository.
Styles in the 0.8.1 format can be automatically updated to the CSL 1.0 format.[4]