Citation File Format Schema

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.

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API entry from apis.yml

apis.yml Raw ↑
aid: citation-cff:cff-schema
name: Citation File Format Schema
tags:
- JSON-Schema
- Schema
- Validation
- YAML
tags_raw:
- JSON Schema
- Schema
- Validation
- YAML
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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.