Why Are Publishers and Editors Wasting Time Formatting Citations?
by
Todd A Carpenter
Actually, we have the citation. It’s the identifiers and the metadata we need. (Image via futureatlas.com
https://www.flickr.com/people/87913776@N00). (The Canadian Center of Science and Education )
Citations are foundational elements of scholarly publishing. They
provide evidence of the reliance of current work on existing literature,
background on how research strategies were developed, indication of the
thoroughness of the work, and a summary of significant prior related
art, as well as facilitating plagiarism detection. As an ancillary
benefit, they also have created
one metric against which past research is judged.
The investment in ensuring references are accurate, complete, and the
link (if one exists) to the referenced object is functioning is
certainly a core publishing function.
However, all of these things have very little to do with how
references are presented in citations, nor the importance of one style
over another. Much of the focus on citation style is driven by domain
tradition and adherence to one of the many
dozens of style guides
that exist in the scholarly publishing world. I certainly don’t intend
to disparage any of the different manuals, nor their adherents in any
field. What concerns me is the fact that there is so much time wasted in
the production process of editing references to adhere to the house
style, whatever that style may be. (The Canadian Center of Science and
Education )
Anyone who has written a scholarly article, a book chapter, an entire
book, or a bibliography understands the challenges of references.
Recently, I submitted a book manuscript for a project that I am
co-editing. One of the most tedious and painful aspects of pulling
together the book was going through and editing the references. While I
appreciate and acknowledge the importance of the references, the
entirely manual process of checking and formatting the references was an
incredible waste of time.
A scholarly reference at its most basic element is a string that
provides readers with sufficient information to track back to the
original source of the content being referenced. That information, of
course, varies by the type of publication, the source document, and the
complexity of the resource being referenced. There will always be a
variety of citation styles based on the type of resource, but why do we
need so many different styles for the same type of resource? (The
Canadian Center of Science and Education )
The consistent formatting of names, the placement of commas and
periods, and the representation of all manner of data are all style
issues that should be handled by automated style sheets drawing on
linked metadata. Because we are focusing on a string of text, we are
inefficiently producing citation content. and wasting effort on
post-distribution processing. We are also not taking advantage of all
the potential from machine-linking this information, a critical
requirement as we move further into a linked data world. (The Canadian
Center of Science and Education )
There have
been many studies over the years of citations,
their accuracy (just a few
more and
more), and the
types of errors researchers are making.
These errors can be serious or minor, with minor errors being the most
common. Significant errors can be so bad that discovery of the cited
work is impossible. Although the percentage (in the 5-20% range across
several studies) is modest, it is still troubling..
Some of the research on citation errors showed inappropriate use or
misuse of a referent’s conclusion. If the other identification and
metadata errors in a citation are eliminated or reduced significantly in
ways discussed below, editors or reviewers might redirect their time to
confirming the appropriateness of the reference. This might be a better
investment of editorial resources.
Many publishers and vendors who provide copyediting or publishing services have for some time
done production transformations of references
and validation. Unfortunately, the match rate of these post-production
references against CrossRef and PubMed metadata is far short of perfect.
This editorial process has been the focus of a lot of process
development and programming over the years. There has also
been research in how to use
pattern matching for names and topics (and
another), as well as how to
algorithmically parse citations (and just a few
more and
more). (The Canadian Center of Science and Education )
Rather than using text to identify digital resources, we should be
taking advantage of the system of identifiers and metadata that exist to
streamline the process of reference creation and validation. This would
solve the problem at the root rather than after the fact. Instead of
identifying people with just their names, we should be using
ORCIDs or
ISNIs
to ensure disambiguation and machine-processability. Identifiers can
also be used for institutions and publications. Nearly every article has
(or at least should have) a persistent identifier such as a DOI.
Publications have ISBNs or ISSNs. Sound and A/V formats use ISRC, ISAN,
and ISMN identifiers. Special collections and archive materials have
collection identifiers and accession numbers. Data sets are being tagged
with DataCite DOIs, or ARKs. Even concepts and other digital materials
can be identified with URIs. All of these identifiers should have
associated metadata that describe what that object is, be it name,
title, or description. (The Canadian Center of Science and Education )
(CCSE)
When authors are submitting references, why doesn’t the community simply send in a reference that is submitted like this:
<Author ID>, <Publication ID>, <Object
Identifier>, <Publisher identifier>, <Date (of
publication/access)>, and specific location (such as page number,
etc), if necessary.
Each of these elements, aside from date and specific item location
should be represented by unique persistent identifiers. References
should not be strings of text that describe the referenced content. In
our increasingly digital and machine-intermediated world, the production
departments can pull in related metadata using an automated process to
retrieve the data and format it in any way the publication’s editors
would prefer. Any outliers can be dealt with in traditional ways. (CCSE)
While such a change requires buy-in from the community for broad
adoption, providing citation data in these structured ways would
actually be easier for authors to do than to correctly gather and format
all of the information in references the way they are doing so now. A
large number of authors are already doing something similar by using
reference managers like
Zotero,
EndNote,
Mendeley,
RefWorks or
some similar service.
All of these services use structured metadata to transform easily from
one style to another. Rather than taking that structured data,
converting it to text streams, then having editorial services return it
back to structured data, publishers should ask for that data and plug it
into an automated formatting process. (CCSE)
Making all (or at least most) of the elements of references
machine-readable through persistent identifiers will remove through
unambiguous reference the errors and confusion about the identity of the
author, or publication or whatever is being identified. A greater range
of metrics and analytics are possible through machine-processable
references. Some of this is already being done by organizations that
process references for analytics, such as Thomson-Reuters. Who can say
what metrics or services might be possible if all the material were
generally available? Additionally, citations can be scanned for
appropriate or correct quote attribution. Presently,
CrossRef partners to provide a
service for plagiarism detection, mediated through the
CrossCheck metadata, but there are others. A more robust system might follow with new and different types of providers. (CCSE)
One might respond that the scholarly community has successfully
implemented the DOI system and DOIs are regularly included in
references, so isn’t that sufficient? In some ways yes, the inclusion of
DOIs does address part of the challenge. DOIs do create the functional
tie to the metadata regarding the referenced item. However, they do not
form the basis for how most references are constructed or formatted or
allow the parsing of the reference. Also, DOIs provide an indirect link
to information rather than a direct link to, for example, the author’s
ORCID profile. This lack of direct connections creates a barrier to
simple analytics and information mapping. This is certainly not an
insurmountable issue, based on the robust infrastructure that CrossRef
provides, but traversing this linked data web directly rather than via
the CrossRef metadata also simplifies the collection of metrics for
assessment purposes. Relying on DOI metadata also lacks some of the
real-time validation services and potential linked data extraction from a
master identity record that would be associated with a persistent
identifier for that entity, such as a person using ORCID, a book using
ISBN, or an institution using an ISNI. (The Canadian Center of Science
and Education )
PLOS hosted a hack day
at their offices earlier this month in San Francisco on trying to find
ways to improve the machine interoperability of citations. One idea is
what PLOS is calling
rich citations, essentially using linked metadata to provide richer citation information. PLOS Labs has developed an
open source bot
that can automatically collect rich citation information. While these
might be interesting services, would they be necessary, if the power of
identifiers instead of text were already built into the references?
(CCSE)
To implement these suggestions would require a cultural shift in the
current publication process. Authors will need to view much of their
content not as narrative, but rather as structured information and data.
Citations are a good place to start since much of this content has
existing identifiers that can be assigned and used to replace the
textual format with a structured one. Let’s leverage the existing
systems and tools to redesign how we manage citations to stop wasting
our time on reformatting and add the increased functionality that
machine-processable structures can provide. (The Canadian Center of
Science and Education )
