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, APA, 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="issue">[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]"/>

BDarcus: I changed "number" to "issue". I also think that all of that content ought likely be moved out of the "container" wrapper into the root level. Finally, should not the container include another type class ("periodical" or "journal")?

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>

BDarcus: this looks good. I wonder, though, about two issues.

1. why not just title and abbreviatedTitle instead of title and subtitle?

2. date-published with books in particular is a can of worms. My book, for example, has a copyright date of 2006 (which is what one would include in the citation) but an actual publication date sometime in late-2005. The specificity of date-published is thus misleading. What we're really talking about is a copyright date. I wonder if the above might not be better with two classes: date and copyright? So then these classes of dates: date, copyright, issued (more generic than published). That slso fits dc and qualified dc.