Citation File Format

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.

Citation File Format publishes 6 APIs on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Academic, Citation, Metadata, Open Standard, and Repository.

The Citation File Format catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context and 2 Spectral governance rulesets.

Citation File Format’s developer surface includes documentation, GitHub presence, and 11 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub

35.2/100 thin ▼ -5.3 Agent 3/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-07-28 · rubric v0.6

AccessFreemium

6 APIs

AcademicCitationMetadataOpen StandardRepositoryResearchSoftwareYAML

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-28 · rubric v0.6

Composite quality — 35.2/100 · thin

Contract Quality 7.3 / 25

Developer Ergonomics 1.7 / 20

Commercial Clarity 7.9 / 20

Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13

Governance 7.0 / 12

Discoverability 6.5 / 10

Agent readiness — 3/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/citation-cff: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Want it done for you? Prioritized profiling — $2,500 →

APIs 6

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Citation Cff Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

JSON Schema 1

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

Documentation 4

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Schema Guide

Schema

JSONSchema

Design & Contract 2

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

JSONLD

JSONLD

Spectral

Spectral

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHub

GitHub

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Operate 1

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Issues

Issues

Commercial 1

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

License

License

Company 1

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Governance

Governance

Citation

Citation

Source (apis.yml)

aid: citation-cff
accessModel:
  pricing: freemium
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Freemium
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - plans
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/citation-cff.png
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-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.
- aid: citation-cff:cffinit
  name: cffinit Authoring Tool
  tags:
  - Authoring
  - cffinit
  - Web App
  image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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: DomainSecurity
  url: security/citation-cff-domain-security.yml
- 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

Citation File Format

Kin Score

APIs 6

Citation File Format Schema

cffinit Authoring Tool

cffconvert

cff-validator GitHub Action

GitHub Native Citation Support

Zenodo Software Publishing

Pricing Plans 1

Citation Cff Plans Pricing

Rate Limits 1

Citation Cff Rate Limits

FinOps 1

Citation Cff Finops

Semantic Vocabularies 1

Citation Cff Context

Spectral Rules 2

Citation File Format API Rules