HzaCode/OneCite

Auditable citation normalization for research workflows
Features •
Quick Start •
Privacy & External Services •
📖 Advanced Usage •
🗺️ Roadmap •
🤝 Contributing
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OneCite is a command-line and Python toolkit that turns messy, mixed-format references — DOIs, PMIDs, arXiv IDs, ISBNs, URLs, and BibTeX fragments — into auditable BibTeX or CSL-JSON records. Strong identifiers follow documented metadata-service routes; ordinary ambiguous plain-text references are returned as candidates for review and are not auto-promoted by process .
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AI-assisted writing, automated literature pipelines, and copy-paste research habits produce ever more reference objects in ever more formats — and ever more chances for wrong, fabricated, or mismatched bibliographic data. Reference *managers* (Zotero), *parsers* (AnyStyle, GROBID), *format converters* (Citation.js), and *identifier-to-BibTeX* helpers (doi2bib, Manubot) each solve one slice of the problem. OneCite targets the under-served step **before** references enter a manuscript, systematic review, or manager: an **auditable normalization layer** that routes strong identifiers (DOI, PMID, arXiv, ISBN, URL, data/software DOIs) to the applicable metadata services, completes available metadata, reports unresolved entries, and produces BibTeX or CSL-JSON.
OneCite is **not another reference manager**, and process does not auto-accept fuzzy title matches. Strong identifiers are resolved through documented source routes; explicitly labelled thesis/dissertation citations have a separate OpenAIRE/BASE route and can fall back to fields parsed from the input. Ordinary ambiguous text is returned as ranked candidates through onecite suggest for human review rather than silently emitted as source-resolved output. That process/suggest separation, together with machine-readable JSON/NDJSON, exit codes, and deterministic offline checks, makes OneCite a scriptable building block for agents, batch jobs, and reproducible reviews rather than a GUI library. Source resolution does not establish that a work is authentic, unretracted, or correctly described by upstream metadata.
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Features
| Feature | Description |
| ----------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Candidate Suggestions** | Search incomplete plain-text references with onecite suggest without promoting them to resolved bibliography output. |
| **Multiple Formats** | Input .txt/.bib → Output **BibTeX** or **CSL-JSON**. |
| **4-stage Pipeline** | A 4-stage process (parse → identify → enrich → format) with explicit unresolved entries. |
| **Field Completion** | Fill available fields returned by metadata sources, such as journal, volume, pages, authors, and abstract. |
| 🎓 **7+ Citation Types** | Handles journal articles, conference papers, books, software, datasets, theses, and preprints. |
| **Input-Routed Lookup** | Uses source-specific routes for Crossref, arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, Google Books, and others. Not every source is queried for every input. |
| **Many Identifier Types** | Resolves DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, ISBN, GitHub URL, Zenodo DOI, and DataCite DOI inputs. |
| **Custom Templates** | YAML-based presets that provide a fallback BibTeX entry type when auto-detection is inconclusive. |
🌐 Data Sources
Privacy and external services
Normal process and suggest runs can make input-dependent outbound requests.
For example, DOI resolution sends the DOI to Crossref (and sometimes a
fallback registry); suggest sends citation queries to Crossref, Semantic
Scholar, and arXiv; arbitrary URL input is fetched from the supplied host; and
thesis queries can be sent to OpenAIRE and BASE. Google Scholar is an optional,
scraping-based suggest fallback that is off by default and may be blocked or
challenged by a CAPTCHA.
OneCite does not provide a privacy-compliance guarantee or a persistent cache
of ordinary live responses. Providers, proxies, output files, and logs may