DocBook --citeproc not producing bibliography

[CameronNicolson]

Hello — I’m having trouble getting pandoc’s citeproc to produce a bibliography when converting from DocBook to PDF.

What I ran that works (inline citation rendered correctly):

pandoc --citeproc --biblio=refs.bib myfile.txt

What I ran that fails (citations stay as [@joe2020], no bibliography generated):

pandoc -s ./reflective-article.docbook --from=docbook --to=pdf --citeproc --biblio=refs.bib --output=example.pdf

Details:

Source file: reflective-article.docbook (DocBook XML)

• Bibliography file: refs.bib (BibTeX)
• Target: PDF (via pandoc’s PDF writer)
• Expected: inline citations rendered and a bibliography appended to the document
• Actual: inline citations remain in bracketed citation key form ([@joe2020]), and no bibliography appears in the PDF.

What I’ve tried:

• Ensured refs.bib is valid BibTeX and in the same directory
• Tried specifying --bibliography instead of --biblio
• Tried adding a CSL file with --csl (no effect)
• Tried changing where I placed the citation in the XML file, inside/outside elements

Questions / things I suspect:

Is pandoc not recognizing citation syntax inside DocBook input? (DocBook may encode citations as literal text rather than pandoc citation elements.)
Do I need to mark a place for the bibliography in the DocBook (e.g., a bibliography element or a placeholder like \bibliography{}) so pandoc knows where to insert it?
Is there a flag or metadata field required when input is DocBook to enable citeproc handling?

Request:

Any suggestions on how to make pandoc process citations and generate a bibliography when converting from DocBook to PDF? Specific diagnostic steps I can run to confirm whether the DocBook-to-pandoc AST conversion is preserving citation nodes would be especially helpful.

If helpful, I can paste a small excerpt of the DocBook file and an example refs.bib entry.

Thanks!

[jgm]

The @citeid syntax will only work in pandoc's markdown, not in DocBook. --citeproc really can't be used with docbook input as things stand.

We could change the reader to read a <citation>citeid</citation> as a citation to citeid. This might be the right thing to do, but docbook has its own citation system (including biblioentry) which we'd presumably need to handle as well. Perhaps a bibliolist could be converted into a references section in metadata, but this is more ambitious.