Citations with Quarto and Zotero

Quarto can automatically format citations and create bibliographies using the tooling provided by Pandoc. This makes it possible to replicate the Zotero to Word or GoogleDocs workflow within a plaintext environment.

Resources

The workflow

1. Create .bib file in Zotero

A BibTex file is a file of references in a special format that ends in .bib. You can create such a file in Zotero as you would other bibliographic styles. While Zotero’s BibTex support is getting better, installing the Better BibTex Zotero plugin will give you more tools to work with BibTex.

As with other formats, there are many options for creating a BibTex file for a project.

  • Through Zotero Collections
    • Right click on a Collection and choose Export Collection
    • Choose Better BibTex
    • Click on Keep updated: This automatically updates the file when you add references to a collection.
      • Auto export can be removed by going to Preferences for Better BibTex and removing the updating feature at the bottom of the preferences.
    • Save file
  • Create a bib file by hand
    • Right click on references and choose Better BibTex -> Copy BibTex to clipboard.
    • Or you can create a bibliography and use BibTex for export style.

When exactly and how you create the bib file is a matter of choice. It can be done all at once or one-by-one as you add citations.

2. Quarto setup

  1. Add the BibTex file to the Quarto project. You might name it references.bib.
  2. Point to the references.bib and choose a citation style in the yaml header. This can either be done on a single page or at the project level in the _quarto.yml configuration file.
---
bibliography: references.bib
csl: https://www.zotero.org/styles/chicago-fullnote-bibliography
---

The csl option links to a specific citation style language file. You can provide a link to either a .csl file in your project or the url of a CSL file. You can find these styles at either CSL Citation styles repository or Zotero’s Style repository.

3. Make citations in your Quarto documents

The BibTex format depends on citekeys that provide unique ways to denote each reference. Citations should appear in square brackets, with an @ before the citekey, and semicolons separating items: [@citekey1; @citekey2].

You can find the citekey for items in Zotero in the item’s information on the right panel.

Citations can include a prefix, a locator, and a suffix:

  • This is a sentence [see @doe99, pp. 33-35 and *passim*; @smith04, chap. 1].
  • Citation of page can use @cite, page 34, @cite, p. 34, @cite, pp. 34–35, or defaults to page with @cite, 34.
  • Other locators, such as chapter, chap./chaps., figure, fig./figs. or folio, fol./fols. are available.
  • Omitting the square brackets will cause the author’s last name to be rendered, allowing it to be the subject of the sentence: @smith04 says blah.

4. Creating a bibliography

By default a bibliography will automatically be placed at the end of a document with citations. You can explicitly provide a space for it with a refs div.

### Bibliography

::: {#refs}
:::

If you do not want a bibliography on a page you can suppress it with suppress-bibliography: true in the document’s or project’s yaml. This is particularly useful in a project in which you only want one bibliography.

By default the bibliography will only include items explicitly cited. You can have the bibliography include all items in the .bib file with the nocite option and a wildcard to choose all citekeys:

---
nocite: |
  @*
---