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You can use Quarto’s project root referencing to flexibly specify the bibliography file relative to your project directory, no matter where the Quarto document is located.

Solution: Use {project} in Your Path

Quarto allows you to reference files relative to the project root using {project}. If references.bib is in your project’s root directory (e.g., inside your Quarto blog repository), use this in your YAML:

bibliography: {project}/references.bib

How It Works

{project} refers to the root directory of your Quarto project, which is usually where your .qmd or _quarto.yml file is located. This ensures that no matter where the .qmd file is located within subdirectories, it will always find references.bib at the project root.

Example Project Structure

{C:\Users\Minerva\Documents\GitHub\quarto-blog\} │-- _quarto.yml │-- references.bib │-- index.qmd │-- posts\ │ ├── post1\ │ │ ├── analysis.qmd <-- This can still find references.bib! │ ├── post2\ │-- styles\

Even if analysis.qmd is inside a nested folder (posts/post1/), using

bibliography: {project}/references.bib

will always point to C:\Users\Minerva\Documents\GitHub\quarto-blog\references.bib.

Why This Is Better

✅ No need for absolute paths
✅ Works across different systems (Windows, macOS, Linux)
✅ More flexible than using ../../ for relative paths