I am using pandoc and pandoc-citeproc to generate a pdf file from a series of markdown files. My references are in sources.bib, my citation format is in apa.csl, my metadata is in default.yaml, a second piece of metadata (containing title, author, date, and abstract) are in meta.md, and I also have paper.md and outline.md.
I am currently attempting to produce a document which consists of my title page, abstract, outline, and references. Because my outline does not contain any citations my reference page is blank. I cannot find any flag in either pandoc or pandoc-citeproc which would force my references to show without any citations. When I include paper.md, which does contain citations, than my reference page works as expected.
The command I am trying to use to produce my paper is:
pandoc --filter pandoc-citeproc default.yaml meta.md outline.md -o outline.pdf
It is possible to add citations without mentioning them in the text by specifying them in the nocite metadata field. Using the special citation @* triggers the inclusion of all references in the bibliography.
---
nocite: '@*'
---
Adding this line to your metadata should do the trick.