Possible to get citation order number rendering for citations?

[matthewfeickert]

In https://mystmd.org/guide/citations#markdown-citations, the MyST docs demonstrate a variety of citation rendering formats. Is it possible to define Markdown citation syntax that will render the citation as the number order that citation appears in the bibliography? Taking the example of @cockett2015 from the docs, if @cockett2015 was the third citation in the document, would it be possible to define syntax like

[n@cockett2015]

that would render as [3]? This is a common citation rendering format in physics (and I assume other areas of science).

These may be dictated/limited by Pandoc's default Citation Style Languages, but if so, is it possible to define a custom one?

[rowanc1]

You should be able to use a site.options of numbered_references:

site:
  options:
    numbered_references: true

I think this should solve what you are looking for, but let us know if not!

[matthewfeickert]

Thanks — this works! Might be worth noting in a similar section on citations that site.options has the ability to overwrite citation style.

[rowanc1]

Put together: #2402

[matthewfeickert]

@rowanc1 Two follow up questions raised by matthewfeickert/report-urssi-fellowship-2025#10:

• With

site:
  template: book-theme
  options:
    numbered_references: true

in myst.yml it seems that to get the @CHTC citation to show up as [3] that it needs to be enclosed in square brackets as [@CHTC]. That's not really a problem, but I expected that defining the numbered_references option would override all APA style without additional revision. Is there a way to globally set this preference?

• Following https://mystmd.org/guide/citations#markdown-citations and grouping [@osg07; @osg09; @OSPool; @OSDF] renders as [4; 5; 6; 7], which is fine/expected. Is it possible to force it to render as the range [4-7]?

edit: Probably not, as that would mess up the tooltip hover over references.