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

19.4/100 emerging ▬ flat Agent 3/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0

AccessFreemium

6 APIs

Academic Citation Metadata Open Standard Repository Research Software YAML

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0

Composite quality — 19.4/100 · emerging

Contract Quality 5.1 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 1.6 / 17

Access Clarity 2.7 / 17

Operational Transparency 1.5 / 11

Contract Governance 1.0 / 10

Discoverability 5.5 / 9

Regulatory Posture 3.1 / 15

Agent readiness — 3/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

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

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Education & Research regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. 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. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

APIs 6

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

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-...

cffinit Authoring Tool

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 co...

cffconvert

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 depositio...

cff-validator GitHub Action

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 caugh...

GitHub Native Citation Support

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.

Zenodo Software Publishing

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...

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Citation Cff Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

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.

Citation Cff Finops

FINOPS

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Citation Cff Context

26 classes · 0 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.

Citation File Format API Rules

5 rules · 3 warnings 2 info

SPECTRAL

Citation File Format API Rules

10 rules · 4 errors 6 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 1

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

Citation File Format (CFF) - Subset Profile

16 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Citation Cff Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Resources

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
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
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: '0.23'
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
  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.
- 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

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