Hey there !
I'm just posting here following @xUser5000 response on a comment I made on GitHub, concerning the way that markdown-it should ideally handle quotes. The idea was that it should replicate, as best as possible, the behaviour of the citeproc plugin of Pandoc, that handles citations. This is because citeproc gives a very flexible syntax that allows citations in the text to take very different forms, which I find really awesome !
I made a small test file to test the different aspects of the syntax to see what Pandoc did with it, using the markdown-preview-plus plugin of the text editor Atom, which allows to use Pandoc with custom arguments to preview the output of a markdown file.
Here, I'll paste the outputs of Pandoc so that one can see how it works. The syntax's rules are summarized on this page.
Testing citations with Pandoc
@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959
This is shown by Dijkstra (1959).
[@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959]
This is shown by (Dijkstra 1959).
-@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959
This is shown by -Dijkstra (1959).
[-@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959]
This is shown by (1959).
-[@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959]
This is shown by -(Dijkstra 1959).
@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959 and @dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959
This is shown by Dijkstra (1959) and Dean (1997).
[@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959 and @deanFindingOptimalRoutes1997]
This is shown by Dean (1997).
[@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959; and @deanFindingOptimalRoutes1997]
This is shown by (Dijkstra 1959; and Dean 1997).
[@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959; and -@deanFindingOptimalRoutes1997]
This is shown by (Dijkstra 1959; and 1997).
@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959 [p. 33]
This is shown by Dijkstra (1959, 33).
@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959 [pp. 33-35, 38-39]
This is shown by Dijkstra (1959, 33–35, 38–39).
@dijkstraNoteTwoProblems1959 [chap. 1 pp. 33-35]
This is shown by Dijkstra (1959, chap. 1 pp. 33-35).
I hope this will be useful !