# Citation File Format

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/citation-cff/  
**Website:** https://citation-file-format.github.io/  
**APIs profiled:** 6

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.

## Kin Score — 19.7 / 100 (emerging)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 19.7).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 64.8 |
| Contract Quality | 25.4 |
| Governance | 9.8 |
| Contract Governance | 9.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 13.2 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 9.5 |
| Commercial Clarity | 15.8 |
| Access Clarity | 15.8 |

Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 20.4 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 3.0 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Freemium — onboarding: unknown, pricing: freemium, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (6)

- **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...

## Security (1)

- **Citation Cff Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Citation Cff Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Academic, Citation, Metadata, Open Standard, Repository, Research, Software, YAML

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/citation-cff/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.