citation-brainstorming

rollaro

Citation Brainstorming

Part of the overall effort to develop a citation microformat.

Use Cases

To focus the discussion, please add use cases below that will help show what problems the citation microformat will be solving.

Use cases for both publishing and consuming citation information can help to focus citation brainstorming on efforts that provide real world utility to users.

For now, please add any uses cases you think of, however common or obscure (feel free to note opinions as to expected/known frequency of use of such use cases).

Acquiring reference information from the web

A user either finds an author's papers page, or is viewing the results of a search and would like to import the information about the displayed papers into their local reference database, for the purposes of cataloging things they've read, adding notes, and using the information to generate later citations, potentially in other forms, such as BibTeX or Docbook, for inclusion in a publication of their own.

Notes: In this case, it isn't important to the user what format the citation takes as displayed on the page where they find it. What *is* important is that it contains enough information to allow generation of the format they will ultimately re-publish it in. This implies that it may be worthwhile to err a little on the side of verbosity.

Also, links to downloadable full representations of the cited work are very important - e.g. a link to the PDF of a journal article, or to a music file.

Subscribing to reading lists, periodicals, etc

I would like to be able to leverage my news aggregator with hAtom to subscribe to a remote source for citation information, for example:

• a reading list for a seminar
• The publication list for a conference (e.g., subscribe to SIGGRAPH and see the updated conference proceedings every year)
• the issues of a journal
• a particular research group or researcher's publications
• Not just research: a popular author's publications (e.g., Malcolm Gladwell's Archive)

Aggregating reading lists and reviews

A citation microformat-specific aggregator could provide a decentralized version of CiteULike. Libraries, authors, research groups, and publishers could mark up their collections, while other people on weblogs or review sites could add tags and reviews.

At least, having a well-adopted microformat would make writing tools like CiteULike much better, since it relies in some cases on screen-scraping publisher web-sites.

Cut & Paste from web pages

Capturing/copying HTML from web pages for use in other applications (especially when those apps present HTML as output), such as pasting into Word, or a specialized application like Google Notebook, Onfolio or Kaboodle. When such captures are made, it makes sense to keep track of the full citation data, including the date it was accessed, which may or may not be the date it was published.

Blogs quoting other resources, including blogs

Any blog that cites online content, whether a blog or news article, could use an hCitation to properly link to the cited reference. Such citations could include the access date when the blogger made the citation, because resources on the other side of those links can change without notice.

Instead, today we have simple formating with a link to the permaURL. The citation data is completely lacking. See Doc Searl's blog for a style of referencing that could benefit from proper a citation uF.

Fascinating... after I added the last two use cases, I realized they focus on potentially marginal cases. The first because it is missing the "output" part of the cut & paste, where the uF would actually be used as part of the paste. The latter because bloggers have a working citation mechanism that is just a link to the URL (hopefully a permaURL). One could argue they wouldn't want a full hCitation. And in fact, until a tool exists that makes it easy, they probably won't. However, a tool that cuts & pastes from anywhere on the web into a blog with a full citation seems like a nice tool. But again, I'm not really paving the cowpaths with these ideas. -Joe Andrieu

Finding in Library

Find a copy of the cited work in a nearby library (as with OpenCOinS).

Buy a copy

Find the cited work on, for example, Amazon or ABE; or subscribe to a journal via its own website.

Find reviews

Find third-party reviews of the cited work.

Give citation data for the page being visited

Adding a class of, say, "self" to an attribute of the proposed strawman would allow users (or user agents) to extract the data required to cite the page being visited, when referring to it elsewhere. There would be the added advantage of allowing the citation to be ignored by any parser which might be building a "tree" of citations, and preventing the setting up of an infinite loop.

For evidence of published "self citation" data (albeit on a secondary page) see the "cite this article" link on any Wikipedia entry, e.g. [1] from [2].

See also Proposal to include on-page citation data in Wikipedia

Examples

• (from a mailing list):

if you want to cite a [biomedical journal] journal article on Wikipedia [...] you can export a correctly-formatted citation for Wikipedia from HubMed using unAPI... http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001408.html

• Zotero, a Firefox extension to help collect, manage, and cite research sources.

Original hBib Discussion

During the WWW2005 Developer's Day microformats track, Rohit Khare gave a presentation where he discussed the microformats process, and then did a quick demonstration wherein a bunch of us got on a shared Subethaedit document, and brainstormed some thoughts on what an "hBib" bibliography citation microformat would look like. Rohit placed the document on his Commercenet site.

• http://cnlabs.commerce.net/~rohit/hBib%20Discussion.html

An attempt to summarize and inline the linked document follows. -Mike

Two major goals were outlined by the group:

• Avoid re-keying references
• Adapt to new journal styles by changing CSS

The fundamental problem was discussed in terms of display - the ability to transform XHTML+hBib into the many journal-specific formats. For example, how to display "et.al" when all authors are present in the source, and how to re-order the elements if a style defines a set order of elements that conflicts with the ordering in the source. Using hCard for authors was agreed on, and the beginnings of an example were shown.

XHTML Structure

With my exprience working X2V and hCa* has taught me what elememts are easy to find and which are not. Since the Citation microformat is very new it is possible to not make a lot of the same errors twice and to make things easier for extracting application to find and imply certain properties.

• There should be some sort of 'root node' that implies all child elements are for the hCitation microformat.
• Since most people will have multiple citations there should be away to represent each hCitation object as a unqiue block independent of another. This is to keep the parse from finding 'author' and applying that to all citations. Each citation should be in a container (class="hcite") that is separated from others.
• Perhaps class="hcite" with <cite> recommended as the root element. E.g. <cite class="hcite">

Note: This section was the original content of the document. Since then, class='hcite' has been agreed on as the root class name. See explanation.

Citation vs. media-info

What distinguishes a cite from say media-info (e.g. media-info-examples) is that a cite is a reference to something explicitly external to the current piece of content or document, whereas media-info describes information about content embedded or inline in the current document.

Semantic Meaning

One of the guiding priniciple of Microformats is to use the most semantically rich element to describe each node (Point 2 of Semantic XHTML Design Principles: Use the most accurately precise semantic XHTML building block for each object etc). Since we are dealing with HTML and citations, several elements are candidates to be used to enrich the semantic meaning. CITE, BLOCKQUOTE, Q, A, (are there more?)

The Citation Brainstorming Page has a few development and ideas about how to give another person credit for a link. Some of the semantic ideas behind their choices of tags can be applied to a full bibliographic type reference. Does this sentence make sense only historically? -Mike

OCLC's WorldCat for titles

Question: what about using something like OCLC's WorldCat for linking titles? - Tim White

This and That

After reading through alot of different citation encoding formats, i noticed that each format was being used in onw of two ways. It was either to describe the Current page (THIS.PAGE) or being used to encode references that point to external resources (THAT.PAGE)

The informatation being encoded was identical for both resources (author, date, name, etc) they just reference different things. For this microformat, i'm not sure if we want to try to solve both problems, or just one? The meta tags in the head element would be the ideal place for information about the THIS.PAGE, but that is not in following with the ideals of microformats where information is human-readable. The THAT.PAGE idea where a list of references is at the end of a document in the form of a bibliography is more inline with the ideals of a microformat where the data is human-readable. That doesn't mean that data about the current document shouldn't be human-readable, so some of the same properties used to reference extermal resources can be used for the current document (THIS.PAGE). To do this a different root item could be used and transforming applications could either extract the citation data about the current page, or information about this page's references.

This is open for discussion, but either way, i believe that the properties used to describe a page will be the same for both THIS and THAT. brian suda

More on This and That

Citation microformats are being explored as a possibility for citing genealogical information at Dan Lawyer's blog.

This is a case where frequently the citation would refer to (THIS.PAGE), but would have nested within it a reference to (THAT.PAGE), possibly a few levels deep. For instance, a web page might contain data extracted from a microfilm of a census. The citation would need to include information about the web page, information about the microfilm, and information about the census. Genealogical citations are expected to include the repository (where can this book or microfilm be found. Is this the same as venue?). So, at each level the information should contain the repository of the referenced item. A nesting (recursive) mechanism for citation microformats would be useful in this case. Is this the function of the "container" element in the Straw Format?

Date Formatting

Since microformats are all about re-use and the accepted way to encode Date-Time has been pretty much settled, then this is a good place to start when dealing with all the different date citation types.

These are all the different fields from various citation formats that are of temporal nature:

* Date (available | created | dateAccepted | dateCopyrighted | dateSubmitted | issued | modified | valid)
* originInfo/dateIssued
* originInfo/dateCreated
* originInfo/dateCaptured
* originInfo/dateOther
* month
* year
* Copyright Year
* Date - Generic
* Date of Confernce
* Date of Publication
* Date of update/revisou/issuance of database record
* Former Date
* Entry Date for Database Record
* Database Update
* Year of Publication

There are several common properties across several citation domains and will certainly be in the citation microformat, the unique instances will need further consideration, otherwise there could be no end to posiblities.

There are also several properties (year, month, Year of publication) that can be extracted from another source. Therefore, if you only encode a more specific property such as; Date of Publication, you can extract the 'year of publication' from that. Since the date-time format we are modeling after is the ISO date-time format, just the Year portion is an acceptable date. So if you ONLY know the year of publication, the you can form a valid 'Date of Publication' as a microformat (which inturn is a valid 'year of publication') - you milage may vary when it comes to importing into citation applications.

...

It seems to me that these can be collapsed to maybe one or two different date properties. As far as the specific human readable formatting of the date, that can be chosen per whatever the presentation style guide says, and the datetime-design-pattern used to simplify the markup. - Tantek

Important Sometimes we need a date range and not simply a date (e.g. 4-6 May 2006). See Conference Citation examples later on this page. - Discoleo

Seasons Some journals have seasonal issues (e.g. "Summer 2006 edition") instead of, or as well as, editions labelled by month or other calendar-date. AndyMabbett 05:05, 4 Nov 2006 (PST)

Tags

Some of the citation formats has a place for 'keywords' or 'generic tags', etc. This might be a good place to re-use the RelTag microformat. The downside would be that they are then forced to be links, which might be the correct way to mark-up these terms.

MARC / MODS / Dublin Core

The MODS (example) and Dublin Core (example) transformations of MARC21 may contain some useful ideas.

Here's a first attempt at rewriting the linked examples in XHTML (written in response to a mailing list query about encoding book information with microformats):

<div class="book" lang="en">
  <h3 class="fn">Arithmetic /</h3>
  <p>By <span class="creator"><span class="fn">Sandburg, Carl</span>,
     <span class="date">1878-1967</span></span>,
     and <span class="illustrator">Rand, Ted</span></p>
  <p>Publisher: <span class="publisher"><span class="fn">Harcourt Brace Jovanovich</span>,
     <span class="locality">San Diego</span></span></p>
  <p>Published: <span class="issued">1993</span></p>
  <p class="description">A poem about numbers and their characteristics. Features
     anamorphic, or distorted, drawings which can be restored to normal by viewing
     from a particular angle or by viewing the image's reflection in the provided
     Mylar cone.</p>
  <p class="note">One Mylar sheet included in pocket.</p>
  <p>Subjects:</p>
  <ul>
    <li class="subject">Arithmetic</li>
    <li class="subject">Children's poetry, American.</li>
    <li class="subject">Arithmetic</li>
    <li class="subject">American poetry</li>
    <li class="subject">Visual perception</li>
  </ul>
</div>

Basic Citation Stuctures

There are basic structures to any citation, this is an overview of some of the types http://www.users.muohio.edu/darcusb/misc/citations-spec.html

Concerns not addressed by existing formats

There are some aspects NOT adequately covered by existing formats. I have addressed this issue on the OpenOffice.org wiki page, too. [see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_Database for an extending discussion, the paragraph on Reference Types]

These issues pertain mainly to Errata, Comments and Authors Reply and Article Retractions.

• a bidirectional link could be necessary to implement these features (original article <=> eratum, reply, retraction letter)
• IMPORTANT: Errata
  • Erata: one or more Corrections might be posted in various issues of the journal
  • this is usually cited as: Orininal Article Citation Data (Correction available in Journal, Issue Nr, Year, Pages) (repeat for more than one correction)
  • it is possibly never cited alone
  • there should be a link to the original article, while the original article should contain a link to this Errata
• IMPORTANT: Commentary and Author Reply
  • similar to Errata, there might be one or more Comments and Author Replys; this should be stored, too
  • however, it is usually not included in the original citation
  • it might be used however in a citation, but I do not know exaclty how to cite it optimally (original article should be provided as well)
• IMPORTANT: Article Retraction
  • an article may be retracted because of plagiarism or some other flaw
  • this should not be used any further in the research
  • however, it might be used e.g. for an article on plagiarism or flawed research
  • there should be therefore one field storing this information, too, and a link to:
  • the published withdrawal letter (which explains why the article was retracted)

• this issue may need a time-controlled event
• IMPORTANT: electronic publishing ahead of print (EPUB)
  • more and more articles are initially posted online, before the published article gets actually printed
  • How should this be used/cited?
  • Is this changed, after the print version becomes available?

Outstanding Issues

See citation-issues.

Examples in the wild

Pages which start to use the discussion above to create working examples in using hcite: (This section could be used as a base for a page like "hcite-examples-in-wild" later).

Please add new examples to the top of this section.

• Example User Page at the regional computer lab Erlangen, Germany, based on the universal information system UnivIS marked up with vcard, hcalender (optional, if user makes a lecture) and hcite.

discussions

• citation-irc-notes-2006-04-09

See also

• citation
• citation-examples
• citation-examples-markup
• citation-formats
• citation-brainstorming
• citation-faq
• citation-issues
• Strawman microformats:
  • hCite
  • h3988 (brainstorming, issues)