Why are my citation styles not appearing correctly?
Last updated on June 02, 2025
How does a citation style work?
The format that a citation style follows is defined by an instructional XML file that belongs to that citation style. This file is called a CSL (Citation Style Language) file. A CSL file contains a set of instructions that explain to Mendeley’s citation software how the citation style should appear when used within our software. These instructions follow a scripted format that our citation software can understand, helping us to ensure that we correctly display your citations and bibliographies in the specific format of that citation style. Each CSL file contains hundreds specific details that ensure your citation and bibliography appear in the correct format.
Where does Mendeley get citation styles from?
Mendeley obtains the citation styles available within its products from the open source community. We chose to the open source community because of the sheer number of citation styles that exist (numbering in their thousands) and the frequency at which new ones appear, old ones changed or even made obsolete. This open source community are committed to providing a universal citation style solution, this is why we contribute and use the open source solutions for our own products. More information can be found here.
If you are experiencing issue with a citation style that requires sentence case (such as APA) not formatting correctly with sentence case, there is unfortunately no reliable way in which we can convert title to sentence case, as we can’t detect when words are proper nouns.
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