How about if we were to take a citation in markdown, converted to html with pandoc with --filter pandoc-citeproc --bibliography bibliography/biblio.bib and then changed things? Would it be a little easier?
Say take Sebastian Sauer's paper (Sauer et al., n.d.) and convert it to html with Pandoc options and then change the code in the html?
Sauer, Sebastian, Sandra Sulzenbruck, Yvonne Ferreira, and Christoph Kurz. n.d. “Making Research Reproducible Using Literate Programming.”