CiteProc is a comprehensive solution for bibliographic and citation formatting. It consists of an easy-to-use XML citation style language (CSL), and the XSLT code to format documents based on them. In essence, it is designed to serve as an XML-based analog to BibTeX, but with dramatic improvements in ease-of-use, metadata flexibility, and international support.

CiteProc reads the source document for citation references and collects the corresponding records from an external bibliographic data store, and then formats the bibliography and citations according to specifications in the CSL file.