Overview
Pandoc is a free-software document converter, widely used as a writing tool (especially by scholars) and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Functionality
Pandoc dubs itself a "markup format" converter. It can take a document in one of the supported formats and convert only its markup to another format. Maintaining the look and feel of the document is not a priority.
Plug-ins for custom formats can also be written in Lua, which has been used to create an exporting tool for the Journal Article Tag Suite, for example.
CiteProc
An included CiteProc option allows pandoc to use bibliographic data from reference management software in any of five formats: BibTeX, BibLaTeX, CSL JSON or CSL YAML, or RIS. The information is automatically transformed into a citation in various styles (such as APA, Chicago, or MLA) using an implementation of the Citation Style Language. This allows the program to serve as a simpler alternative to LaTeX for producing academic writing in Markdown with inline citation keys. Or the program can be used to convert any bibliographic data stream in the accepted formats into a list of citations in a chosen style.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).