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BibliographicCitation

  1. Purpose of this document
  2. Some places I find citations
  3. Common data representations of citations
  4. Styling
  5. NLM
  6. Information about citation styles

Purpose of this document

We want to find a unified way to handle bibliographic citations. Users should be able to move citations between different computation environments seamlessly and format them into the desired styles easily.

I'm trying to summarize where we are as a community at moving towards such a goal.

Some places I find citations

People will want to format the citations for different purposes.

A (seemingly) reasonable approach is to come up with a common data representation and then transform from that format into the various styles. I'm trying to figure out how far people have gotten with this approach and where we can go next.

from Bruce: actually, a better approach (seen in BiblioX) is have an internal formatting data model that one maps different bib formats to. It's impossible to ask everyone to standardize on only one data representation, in part because bibliographic metadata serves somewhat different purposes than the data model of the citations that get formatted with it.

Handling bibliographic citations is an important issue in the ScholarsBox development realm.

Common data representations of citations

If I use various journal sites that allow for teh download of a citation, one can get at a list of some formats that are perceived to be important. For an example article in [WWW]Science, we see the options for:

Looking at [WWW]PLoS Biology: Citation Formats (Lander AD (2004) A Calculus of Purpose. PLoS Biol 2(6): e164 [DOI]10.1371/journal.pbio.0020164), we get the following format:

Note from SteveToub: [WWW]BibUtils, written in C, can transform between MODS, Endnote, RIS and BibTeX data formats.

Styling

Naively, I would think that one should be able to create citations in a common XML format and then write XSLT stylesheets to transform them into common formats. But the comment from Judith Bush of RedLightGreen gives me pause ([WWW]Tuna Breath: Updates):

Note from Bruce: I've written an XSLT stylesheet to format MODS records, and it's not that hard, aside from handling examples like (Doe, 1999a, 1999b). It does require a good bibliographic format (which MODS is) properly coded, which is the problem that Judith seems to be pointing to. Consider, for example, that a MODS record sourced from the LoC may have a title that is coded like so: <title>Some title [additional stuff]</title>, have funky punctuation, etc.. That additional stuff doesn't go in the citation (and arguably doesn't belong in the XML either. Note, though: the problem here has nothing at all to do with XML or XSLT; it's a problem of the MARC source data, which Endnote users also have to deal with if they use its z39.50 support. Indeed, when I used that app, I spent almost as much time cleaning up the data sourced from MARC as I did entering new records from scratch!

BTW, BiblioX is a project to do XSLT-based formatting, and has an XML style spec language analogous to BibTeX .bst files, or the binary style files in Endnote.

RedLightGreen offers the following formats:

Others of interest:

I wonder how hard it is to get a repository of machine-actionable style files. Buy it from [WWW]Refworks Web Based Bibliographic Management Software?

NLM

[WWW]Sample PubMed Central Citations - XML Tagged:

See also:

<nlm-citation> seems to be used in the PublicLibraryOfScience journals. For example, if you look in the [WWW]XML version of [WWW]PLoS Biology: A Calculus of Purpose, you will see the first reference:

based on the following XML: 

<ref id="pbio-0020164-Alon1">
        <nlm-citation citation-type="journal">
                <person-group person-group-type="author">
                        <name>
                                <surname>Alon</surname>
                                <given-names>U</given-names>
                        </name>
                        <name>
                                <surname>Surette</surname>
                                <given-names>MG</given-names>
                        </name>
                        <name>
                                <surname>Barkai</surname>
                                <given-names>N</given-names>
                        </name>
                        <name>
                                <surname>Leibler</surname>
                                <given-names>S</given-names>
                        </name>
                </person-group>
                <article-title>Robustness in bacterial chemotaxis</article-title>
                <source>Nature</source>
                <year>1999</year>
                <volume>397</volume>
                <fpage>168</fpage>
                <lpage>171</lpage>
        </nlm-citation>
</ref>

Wow, I did not know that the biologists have been so active/engaged in the world of XML-marked up citations. A little poking around led me to the following links (which i plan to follow up at some point):

Information about citation styles