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tl;dr http://chronograph.labs.crossref.org

At Crossref we mint DOIs for publications and send them out into the world, but we like to hear how they’re getting on out there. Obviously, DOIs are used heavily within the formal scholarly literature and for citations, but they’re increasingly being used outside of formal publications in places we didn’t expect. With our DOI Event Tracking / ALM pilot project we’re collecting information about how DOIs are mentioned on the open web to try and build a picture about new methods of citation.

Remember when I said that the Wikipedia was the 8th largest referrer of DOI links to published research? This despite only a fraction of eligible references in the free encyclopaedia using DOIs. We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia. This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references.

[ Crossref Labs loves to be the last to jump on an internet trend, so what better than than to combine the Doge meme with altmetrics? Note: The API calls below have been superceeded with the development of the Event Data project. See the latest API documentation for equivalent functionality Want to know how many times a Crossref DOI is cited by the Wikipedia? http://det.labs.crossref.org/works/doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0086859 Or how many times one has been mentioned in Europe PubMed Central?

So while doing some background reading today I realized that legal citations already widely support a form of “citation typing” in the form of “Introductory Signals“. The 10 introductory signals break down as follows… In support of an argument: 1) [no signal]. (NB that, apparently, this is increasingly deprecated.) 2) accord; 3) see; 4) see also; 5) cf.; For Comparisons: 6) compare … with …; For contradiction: 7) but see;

This D-Lib paper by Altman and King looks interesting: “A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data”. (And thanks to Herbert Van de Sompel for drawing attention to the paper.) Gist of it (Sect. 3) is

_“We propose that citations to numerical data include, at a minimum, six required components. The first three components are traditional, directly paralleling print documents. … Thus, we add three components using modern technology, each of which is designed to persist even when the technology changes: a unique global identifier, a universal numeric fingerprint, and a bridge service. They are also designed to take advantage of the digital form of quantitative data.

An example of a complete citation, using this minimal version of the proposed standards, is as follows:

**Micah Altman; Karin MacDonald; Michael P. McDonald, 2005, “Computer Use in Redistricting”,

hdl:1902.1/AMXGCNKCLU UNF:3:J0PkMygLPfIyT1E/8xO/EA==

http://id.thedata.org/hdl%3A1902.1%2FAMXGCNKCLU

“_