Sloan Foundation funds Columbia and Mendeley to develop a Citation-Style Language Editor

The Sloan Foundation has awarded a $125,000 grant to Columbia University and Mendeley to fund the development of a Citation-Style Language (CSL) editor. CSL is a XML-based language to format citations and bibliographies, and is used by the reference managers Zotero, Mendeley and Papers, and in many other places. Even though more than 1000 citation styles are available at CitationStyles.org (and built into the tools using CSL), it has until now been fairly hard to create new citation styles – editing XML files is not everyones idea of having fun. The CSL editor will be made available as open source software.

Building a dedicated CSL editor will be a tremendous boost to the format. The press release is here.

In related news, Mekentosj is giving away a Papers 2 serial number for every citation style submitted to CitationStyles.org.

References

Fenner M. Citation Style Language: An Interview with Rintze Zelle and Ian Mulvany. Published online September 24, 2010. doi:10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw5y