Citeease-cli NPM

CiteEase CLI

npm npm License

citeease-cli is a CLI tool that generates formatted citations (references) based on various unique identifiers, including URL, DOI, ISBN, PMID, and PMCID. Just pass in your identifiers, and citeease-cli will handle the rest!

📋 Table of Contents

⚙️ Installation

Install citeease-cli globally via npm:

npm install -g citeease-cli

Or use it directly with npx without global installation:

npx citeease-cli cite <list of identifiers>

🚀 Usage

To generate citations, provide a list of unique identifiers as arguments. citeease-cli will attempt to identify the type of each identifier automatically.

Options

--style, -s <style>: Choose the citation style for the output (e.g., apa, modern-language-association, chicago-author-date). The default is APA.
--locale, -l <locale>: Set the locale for the citation language (e.g., en-US for U.S. English, fr-FR for French, ar for Arabic). The default is en-US.
--format, -f <format>: Specify the output format. Options include text (default), html, rtf, and asciidoc.
--intext, -i: Include in-text citations (e.g., (Author, Year)) in the output. By default, in-text citations are disabled.
--no-intext: Exclude in-text citations from the output. This option is only necessary if the intext configuration is set to true by default.
--log-errors, -e: Enable logging of errors for debugging purposes.
--version, -v: Display the current version of citeease-cli.

Note: You can check available citation styles and locales at:
Styles: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
Locales: https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales

Examples

# Using a globally installed package
cite 10.1000/xyz123 978-3-16-148410-0

# Specifying a citation style and locale
cite --style modern-language-association --locale en-GB 10.1000/xyz123

# Including in-text citations
cite --intext 10.1000/xyz123

# Excluding in-text citations when enabled by default
cite --no-intext 10.1000/xyz123

# Specifying an output format
cite --format html 10.1000/xyz123

Or with npx:

npx citeease-cli cite --style chicago-author-date --locale fr-FR --format rtf https://example.com/article

Specifying Identifier Types

If citeease-cli misinterprets an identifier’s type or if you want to force a specific type, you can prefix it with the type and a colon, like so:

cite "url: https://doi.org/10.xyz123" "isbn: 978-3-16-148410-0"

This will force citeease-cli to treat the first identifier as a URL and the second as an ISBN. This works for all identifier types: url, doi, isbn, pmid, and pmcid.

🔧 Configuration

citeease-cli allows you to configure default settings for citation generation using the config command. This helps you avoid repeating options like style, locale, format, or in-text citations with every command.

Configuration Options

style: Set the default citation style (e.g., apa, mla, chicago-author-date).
locale: Set the default locale (e.g., en-US, fr-FR, ar).
format: Set the default output format (e.g., text, HTML, rtf, asciidoc).
intext: Enable or disable in-text citations by default. The default value is false.
reset: Reset all configurations to their default values.

Examples

# Set default citation style to APA
cite config style apa

# Set default locale to en-US
cite config locale en-US

# Set default output format to HTML
cite config format html

# Enable in-text citations by default
cite config intext true

# Reset all configurations
cite config reset

Use the config <KEY> command without a value to view the current setting for a key.

🆔 Supported Identifiers

DOI: e.g., 10.1093/ajae/aaq063
URL: e.g., https://example.com
ISBN: e.g., 978-3-16-148410-0
PMID: e.g., 27097605
PMCID: e.g., PMC6323133

🌐 Data Sources

citeease-cli uses the following free APIs to retrieve citation data:

CrossRef: For DOI-based data, e.g., https://api.crossref.org/works/<DOI>
Open Library: For ISBN-based data, e.g., https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=isbn:<ISBN>&mode=everything&fields=*,editions
NCBI: For data from PubMed and PubMed Central, e.g., https://api.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/lit/ctxp/v1/pubmed/?format=csl&id=<PMID> and https://api.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/lit/ctxp/v1/pmc/?format=csl&id=<PMCID>

These APIs provide open-access data for research and citation.

📄 Output

citeease-cli generates a formatted citation (reference) for each identifier. The output is styled for easy copy-pasting into documents and includes all relevant citation details, formatted according to standard citation styles, locale settings, and output format.