citation-irc-notes-2006-04-09

Summary

A citation microformat needs to cover four uses:

1. full, bibliographic citations, eg "The Title Of An Article. Smith J. Journal Title (1987). 46:1; 23-35." This is the main citation microformat and should contain all the information necessary to locate the item and create a text citation in all the common formats (MLA, ALA, etc).
2. minimal, inline citations in text, eg (Smith, 1987). These generally link to an item in the bibliography using a fragment identifier.
3. full, inline citations in text, eg following a blockquote.
4. description of the current item/page, including title, creator, date etc.

Current problems

• Bibliographies published in HTML generally just use plain text (a URL is often included), but are produced from fully marked-up data, which is lost.
• inline citations often link to bibliography items, but use named anchors rather than fragment identifiers.
• There are multiple ways of adding self-descriptive data to web pages, such as meta tags -- with or without Dublin Core -- or embedded RDF.

Microformat for inline citations

<cite>
<a href="#ref-1">1</a>
</cite>

<cite>
<a href="#ref-1">Smith, 2002</a>
</cite>

Microformat for a generic bibliography citation

<li class="citation" id="ref-1">
<span class="title">
 <a class="url" href="http://dx.doi.org/[DOI]">[item title]</a>
</span>
<span class="creator vcard">
 <span class="n">
  <span class="family-name">[surname]</span>, 
  <abbr title="[given-name]" class="given-name">[initial]</abbr>
 </span>
</span>
<span class="creator vcard">
 <span class="n">
  <span class="family-name">[surname]</span>, 
  <abbr title="[given-name]" class="given-name">[initial]</abbr>
 </span>
</span>
<abbr class="date-published" title="YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+ZZ:ZZ">[year]</abbr>
</li>

Note: for an full inline citation, the

<li class="citation" id=""></li>

would be replaced by

<cite></cite>

and there would not be a link to a local fragment.

Note: for a self citation, the

<li class="citation" id=""></li>

would be replaced by

<span|div class="citation self"></span|div>

Additional elements for a journal article citation

class="citation article"
<span class="container">
 <span class="title">
  <a class="url" href="http://dx.doi.org/[doi]">[journal title]</a>
 </span>
 <abbr class="date-published" title="YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+ZZ:ZZ">[year]</abbr>
 <span class="volume">[volume no.]</span>
 <span class="number">[issue no.]</span>
 <abbr class="uri" title="urn:issn/[issn]"/>
</span>

<span class="pages">[start-page]-[end-page]</span>
<abbr class="uri" title="info:pmid/[PMID]"/>

Additional elements for a book citation

class="citation book"
<span class="container">
 <span class="title">
  <a class="url" href="http://dx.doi.org/[doi]">[book title]</a>
 </span>
 <span class="subtitle">[book subtitle]</span>
 <span class="publisher vcard">[publisher]</span>
 <span class="editor vcard">[editor]</span>
 <abbr class="date-published" title="YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+ZZ:ZZ">[year]</abbr>
 <abbr class="uri" title="urn:isbn/[isbn]"/>
</span>

<span class="pages">[start-page]-[end-page]</span>