Output Formats

OneCite currently writes BibTeX only. Earlier versions also advertised APA and MLA output, but those renderers produced inconsistent results and have been removed (see issues #31 and #32). The CLI now rejects any --output-format other than bibtex.

If you need APA or MLA output, run OneCite first to get a clean BibTeX file and then pipe it through a dedicated renderer such as pandoc, citeproc-py or bibtex2html.

BibTeX Format

BibTeX is the standard format for LaTeX documents.

Format Specification

@article{LeCun2015Deep,
  doi = "10.1038/nature14539",
  title = "Deep Learning",
  author = "LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey",
  abstract = "Deep learning allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction...",
  journal = "Nature",
  year = 2015,
  volume = 521,
  number = 7553,
  pages = "436-444",
  publisher = "Springer Science and Business Media LLC",
  url = "https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539"
}

Using BibTeX Format

# Command line (bibtex is the default, the flag is optional)
onecite process references.txt -o output.bib --output-format bibtex

# Python API
from onecite import process_references

result = process_references(
    input_content="10.1038/nature14539",
    input_type="txt",
    template_name="journal_article_full",
    output_format="bibtex",
    interactive_callback=lambda candidates: 0
)

for citation in result['results']:
    print(citation)

Integration with LaTeX

  1. Save references to a .bib file using OneCite

  2. In your LaTeX document:

    \documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

Some text citing \cite{LeCun2015Deep}.

\bibliography{output}
\bibliographystyle{plain}

\end{document}

  3. Compile with bibtex:

    pdflatex document.tex
bibtex document
pdflatex document.tex
pdflatex document.tex

BibTeX Entry Types

Common entry types produced by OneCite:

  • @article - Journal article

  • @inproceedings - Conference paper

  • @book - Book

  • @phdthesis - PhD thesis

  • @mastersthesis - Master’s thesis

  • @misc - Miscellaneous

  • @software - Software

  • @dataset - Dataset

Tips

  • Use consistent key naming (e.g., Author + Year format)

  • Keep special characters (accents, math) in the title field escaped as BibTeX expects

  • If OneCite cannot classify an entry confidently, it falls back to the entry_type declared by the selected template — see Custom Templates

Next Steps