The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML file format that describes schema for the formatting of citations and bibliographies.
Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers.
The Pandoc lightweight document conversion system also supports citations in CSL, YAML, and JSON formats and can render these using any of the CSL styles listed in the Zotero Style Repository.
Since 2008, the core development team consists of D'Arcus, Frank Bennett, Rintze Zelle, Brenton Wiernik and Denis Maier.
[4] On its release in 2006, Zotero became the first application to adopt CSL.