Academic writing increasingly relies on consistent, machine-readable formatting—especially when preparing manuscripts for digital publication, automated parsing, or citation indexing. This post demonstrates how the Mistral Le Chat can accurately convert plain-text bibliographic entries into structured HTML, generating both inline (short-form) citations and full bibliographic records with cross-linked anchors. This approach supports better interoperability across web-based academic platforms, enabling rapid formatting of entire bibliographies directly from raw input. Whether compiling a literature review or building a dynamic reference section, this workflow offers a precise and efficient solution.
Prompt
To evaluate Mistral Le Chat’s capabilities, we provided a plain-text bibliographic citation in standard academic format (e.g. APA or MLA), including full author names, article title, publication venue, and year. The prompt instructed the model to generate two outputs: a short, in-text citation with internal hyperlinking, and a full HTML-formatted bibliographic entry suitable for web integration. Crucially, the HTML output was expected to include a stable id tag, a back-reference link for bidirectional navigation, and appropriate styling for use in academic publishing contexts. The model was further expected to apply consistent punctuation, correctly italicise journal or conference titles, and include persistent identifiers such as DOIs where applicable.
Task:
Convert the following plain-text citation into structured HTML with two components:
Full bibliographic entry with:
- Full author names
- Year
- Title in single quotation marks
- Journal or venue name in italics
- Link to the paper (based on the DOI or known source)
- Anchor back-reference (^ Back)
In-text citation with:
- Author-year format
- Internal link pointing to the full entry above
Use clean inline HTML, consistent with the structure shown below.
Example input:
Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. "Attention is all you need." Advances in neural information processing systems 30 (2017).
Example output:
Short version (in-text citation): (<a id="vaswani2017-link" href="#vaswani2017" style="color: #5A3E85; text-decoration: underline;">Vaswani et al. 2017</a>) Full version (bibliographic entry): <p id="vaswani2017" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: inherit; margin: 0;"> Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. ‘Attention Is All You Need’. <em>Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems</em> 30. <a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/hash/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Abstract.html" target="_blank"> https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/hash/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Abstract.html</a> <a href="#vaswani2017-link" style="font-size: 0.7em; color: gray; text-decoration: none;">^ Back</a> </p>
Now return the following entry using the same format as above:
Goodfellow, Ian J., Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. 2014. ‘Generative Adversarial Networks’. arXiv. doi:10.48550/ARXIV.1406.2661
Output
The output generated by Mistral Le Chat performed flawlessly. The model not only structured the HTML snippet exactly as requested—complete with a short in-text citation and a full bibliographic entry—but also ensured that the citation was well-formatted, linked correctly, and displayed consistently in the document.
As shown below, the citation has been successfully embedded in the document using the structured HTML returned by the model. The in-text citation is clickable and leads directly to the full reference entry:
and
Goodfellow, Ian J., Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. 2014. ‘Generative Adversarial Networks’. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1406.2661 ^ Back
This output clearly demonstrates how a language model like Mistral Le Chat can reliably generate semantically rich, navigable academic references that integrate seamlessly into a structured HTML environment.
Recommendations
Structured HTML citations offer clear benefits for academic publishing, especially in web-based contexts. Mistral Le Chat proved highly effective in generating clean, linkable references from plain-text input. For optimal results, we recommend standardised citation formatting, inclusion of persistent links (e.g. DOIs), and the use of internal anchors for seamless in-text navigation. This approach streamlines the creation of machine-readable, interoperable bibliographies.
The authors used Mistral Le Chat [Mistral (2025) Mistral Le Chat (accessed on 6 June 2025), Large language model (LLM), available at: https://www.mistral.ai] to generate the output.
