As I mentioned briefly in my earlier post on using Pandoc, one way to be able to use citations with pandoc is to use the zotxt extension with Zotero. The zotxt extension comes with an emacs integration as well zotxt-emacs, but I could not get it to work reliably.
Instead after quite a bit of searching on GitHub, I came across this gist which works pretty reliably. Reproducing the Gist here for reference:
(setq reftex-default-bibliography '("/path/to/bibliography/file.bib"))
;; define markdown citation formats
(defvar markdown-cite-format)
(setq markdown-cite-format
'(
(?\C-m . "[@%l]")
(?p . "[@%l]")
(?t . "@%l")
)
)
;; wrap reftex-citation with local variables for markdown format
(defun markdown-reftex-citation ()
(interactive)
(let ((reftex-cite-format markdown-cite-format)
(reftex-cite-key-separator "; @"))
(reftex-citation)))
;; bind modified reftex-citation to C-c[, without enabling reftex-mode
(define-key markdown-mode-map "\C-c[" 'markdown-reftex-citation)
;; Additional configuration to allow invoking this with the traditional SPC menu in Spacemacs
(spacemacs/set-leader-keys-for-major-mode 'markdown-mode "ir" 'markdown-reftex-citation)
You can add this function to your Emacs init.el after which you can invoke it by typing Ctrl-C-[ or in spacemacs by typing SPC-m-i-r when in Markdown mode. Note that the first invocation of this function can glitch where it will insert a LaTeX style citation but it works fine when you invoke it a second time.