I remember reading posts on the emacs-orgmode mailing list back in 2014 about what citations should look like, and what backend should be used. At the time I w

I remember reading posts on the emacs-orgmode mailing list back in 2014 about what citations should look like, and what backend should be used. At the time I was picking software to organize notes for my PhD thesis. There was some discussion of adding link handlers and packing citation metadata into regular links, like [[cite:key][citation metadata which would normally be display text]]. That sort of worked, although citations with multiple citation keys didn't fit easily into that approach. The final outcome looks great: (1) terse syntax that's easy to type and read but very flexible, (2) clear delimiters, and (3) option to use CSL styles, which are numerous and very easy to modify.