(I like this so much that I’ll repost it here after writing about it on the Overleaf blog!)

It’s now possible to use Citation Style Language stylesheets (.csl files) to format citations and reference lists in LaTeX documents! Make sure your LaTeX packages are reasonably up-to-date for this to work.

You can find .csl styles here (let’s use uoy-archaeology-jsm.csl as an example); and put it in the same folder as your .tex file. Load the citation-style-language package in the preamble:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{citation-style-language}
\cslsetup{style = uoy-archaeology-jsm}
\addbibresource{researchDesign.bib}
 
\begin{document}
... This combination of data from multiple sources may present problems 
in the categorisation and comparison of sites across the region as a 
whole, in particular the Scottish region where few radiocarbon dates are
available and many site not been classified by date 
\cite{elliot-email-2023,beckensall-northumberland-2005}
 
\printbibliography
 
\end{document}

Then after compiling with latex/pdflatex/xelatex, instead of running bibtex to process the citations and .bib file, run the citeproc-lua command instead. Follow up with the usual one or two more runs of latex/pdflatex/xelatex, and watch your citations and references appear. A .bbl file will be generated, which you can include in your manuscript submissions to journals.

But if you’re compiling with LuaLaTeX, things will “just work” with just a single compile.

This will be useful if your institution or journal requires a particular reference style that doesn’t have a corresponding BibTeX or biblatex style file, but does have a CSL style file.