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.
APIs
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...