The docstring standard at http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/wiki/CodingStyleGuidelines#docstring-s... suggests a citation reference format that is not compatible with reStructuredText. Quoting from http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#citations: Citations are identical to footnotes except that they use only non-numeric labels such as [note] or [GVR2001]. In other words, the standard currently promotes a conflation of notes and citations. Another reason for avoiding the style currently in the docstring standard is that it renders impossible the generation of citations using a citation database. (See e.g. the bibtext-like facilities offered by bibstuff's bib4txt (http://code.google.com/p/bibstuff/). Alan Isaac