Markdown citations interpreted as list headings

[malcolmsailor]

In Pandoc's Markdown, I'm having an issue with citations after newlines in list items being interpreted as list headings. Here's what seems to be a minimal example:

- Miscellaneous text in list followed by line break and citation
    @author2024paper.

If I save this in file.md and run pandoc -t latex file.md, I get the following output:

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
  Miscellaneous text in list followed by line break and citation

  \begin{enumerate}
  \def\labelenumi{\arabic{enumi}.}
  \tightlist
  \item
  \end{enumerate}
\end{itemize}

The citation is rendered as a list item, which is of course not what I want.

If I put the citation in curly braces like @{author2024paper}, it fixes the issue. However, my workflow involves first recompiling my document as markdown in order to apply a few extensions (i.e., doing pandoc -f markdown -t markdown+EXTENSIONS) and at this stage pandoc removes the curly braces.

Is there an approved way of avoiding this scenario?

[jgm]

It is, in fact, valid syntax for an example list item.

I don't have any good advice. Why don't you open issue requesting that the markdown writer use {} for citations when they begin a line?

[jgm]

On second thought, I don't see a clean way of implementing this.

[malcolmsailor]

Thanks for your reply.

I figured out a workaround for my use case which is to use the --wrap=preserve option when doing the -f markdown -t markdown step. The hard line breaks pandoc was adding was what was sometimes placing my citations at the start of lines in this way.