TL;DR

Watch a real-time stream of DOIs being cited (and “un-cited!” ) in Wikipedia articles across the world: https://0-live-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/live.html

Background

For years we’ve known that the Wikipedia was a major referrer of Crossref DOIs and about a year ago we confirmed that, in fact, the Wikipedia is the 8th largest refer of Crossref DOIs. We know that people follow the DOIs, too. This despite a fraction of Wikipedia citations to the scholarly literature even using DOIs. So back in August we decided to create a Wikimedia Ambassador programme. The goal of the programme was to promote the use of persistent identifiers in citation and attribution in Wikipedia articles. We would do this through outreach and through the development of better citation-related tools.

We have just released a bunch of new functionality for Crossref Metadata Search. The tool now supports the following features: A completely new UI Faceted searches Copying of search results as formatted citations using CSL COinS, so that you can easily import results into Zotero and other document management tools An API, so that you can integrate Crossref Metadata Search into your own applications, plugins, etc. Basic OpenSearch support- so that you can integrate Crossref Metadata Search into your browser’s search bar.

PDF-EXTRACT

Crossref Labs is happy to announce the first public release of “pdf-extract” an open source set of tools and libraries for extracting citation references (and, eventually, other semantic metadata) from PDFs. We first demonstrated this tool to Crossref members at our annual meeting last year. See the pdf-extract labs page for a detailed introduction to this new set of tools.

If you are unable to download and install the tool, you can play with a experimental web interface called “Extracto.” Be warned, Extracto is running on very feeble server using an erratic and slow internet connection. The only guarantee that we can make about using it is that it will repeatedly fall over and annoy you. The weasel has spoken.

Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales. In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported.

I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.* Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the “typed link”, a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his 1983 Ph.D. thesis.. Basically, Trigg points out something that should be fairly obvious- a citation (i.

So the other day Noel O’Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the Crossref APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year.

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

I just ran across the final report from the CLADDIER project. CLADDIER comes from the JISC and stands for “CITATION, LOCATION, And DEPOSITION IN DISCIPLINE & INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES”. I suspect JISC has an entire department dedicated to creating impossible acronyms (the JISC Acronym Preparation Executive?) Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community. I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG’s Measure for Measure seminar last June.

I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at Crossref- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

A couple of recent posts - from A couple of recent posts - from at Jefferson University and IFST at Univ of Delaware- note that the AMA and APA style guides now recommend using a DOI, if one is assigned, in a journal article citation.

A citation in the APA style with a DOI would be:

Conley, D., Pfeiffera, K. M., & Velez, M. (2007). Explaining sibling differences in achievement and behavioral outcomes: The importance of within- and between-family factors. Social Science Research36(3), 1087-1104. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2006.09.002

In the AMA style a reference would be:

Kitajima TS, Kawashima SA, Watanabe Y. The conserved kinetochore protein shugoshin protects centromeric cohesion during meiosis. Nature. 2004;427(6974):510-517. doi:10.1038/nature02312

This is great news. I haven’t looked at the full style guides but it’s not clear if information is given about linking DOIs via http://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/