Define the following two files.

document.qmd:

---
title: "Quarto bibliography.yml references"
bibliography: bibliography.yml
---

Making a citation to citation key `osmnx` [@osmnx].

bibliography.yml:

- id: osmnx
  DOI: 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2017.05.004
  type: article-journal
  title: 'OSMnx: New methods for acquiring, constructing, analyzing, and visualizing complex street networks'
  author:
  - given: Geoff
    family: Boeing

Run:

quarto render document.qmd

Note the logged error:

[WARNING] Citeproc: citation osmnx not found

Prepending the following to bibliography.yml solves the issue:

references:

IIRC Pandoc accepts CSL JSON (as JSON or YAML) when formatted a list of dictionaries rather than a top-level dictionary with a references key.