refme

refme 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 refme will handle the rest!

📋 Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• Supported Identifiers
• Data Sources
• Output
• License
• Contact

⚙️ Installation

Install refme globally via npm:

npm install -g refme

Or use it directly with npx without global installation:

npx refme <list of identifiers>

🚀 Usage

To generate citations, provide a list of unique identifiers as arguments. refme 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.

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 globally installed package
refme 10.1000/xyz123 978-3-16-148410-0

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

Or with npx:

npx refme --style chicago-author-date --locale fr-FR https://example.com/article

Specifying Identifier Types

If refme 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:

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

This will force refme 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.

🆔 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

refme 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

refme 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 and locale settings.

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

📧 Contact

For inquiries or more information, you can reach out to us at [email protected].