FW: A new citation style

[Eugene Garfield]

-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On Behalf Of Arif Jinha
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2011 11:30 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: A new citation style

Dear friends,

we need to officially create an accepted and updated citation style.
However, print publication has a production and preservational value that ought to be preserved.  A publisher may easily deliver their highest-quality journals in print, while publishing the same articles online in OA.  They just need the right business model to accomplish this.  By putting the resources into high-quality print publication sends a message that these articles have value, the writing, copy-editing and print presentations give greater gravitas and impact to the content.  For print publications, I suggest maintaining the geographical information about the publisher, because locality is still important to culture, and thus the culture of publishing houses in different regions.  When something is in print, people take in the whole of the work.  When it is electronic, people tend to sift for data or even just the bits they need to reference to back up their analysis.  The second route is pragmatic insofar as it gets work done but the time taken to read the whole of the work gives incentive to digest information in a more reflective fashion.  Such considerations reflexively affect the culture of research, and beg of the need for quality and contemplation of the ideas - not just the bits of information that are often grabbed and embedded in the polemics of research agendas.

A new citation style for online articles would include author-date, article and journal title, DOI, and link to the OA version of an article if available, and if not to the abstract.  This convention would favour OA versions. There should be a limit on characters, this would encourage concise titles (short versions if necessary) and disqualify the pasting of lengthy website addresses.  Citation for printed works should be used authentically, that is when the author is getting the information from the
hard copy, and therein should include geographical location.   In all the
citation style should appropriately and authentically reflect the research to publication process, whilst being convenient to the reader in their study.

many thanks for your consideration and time,

Arif Jinha, MA
Wakefield, QC
Canada

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew A. Adams" <aaa at MEIJI.AC.JP>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: Is a Different OA Strategy Needed for Social Sciences and Humanities? (No)


> On 2011-11-06, at 5:58 PM, Jean-Claude Gu don wrote:
>> most SSH journals would not accept the kind of referencing he 
>> suggests. Most journals, in fact, impose their citation and quotation 
>> referencing styles. As they now also accept electronic references, it 
>> leads to what I said: references to repository articles are beginning 
>> to appear in significant numbers. This raise a new question, that of 
>> quality control of the versions in the repositories, but that can be 
>> solved too. It is therefore true that the lack of reliable pagination 
>> is probably a fading inconvenience.
Stevan Harnad replied:
> Yes, quote-location convention-updating is a minor and fading 
> inconvenience. But not because we need (or are providing) peer review 
> for already peer-reviewed author drafts, just so that quotes can have 
> page numbers! There are simple ways to accomplish that. And what is 
> cited is the canonical published version of record, not the specific 
> document one actually accessed. (I don't cite a photocopy of an 
> article, I cite the article -- journal, title, date, volume,
> page-span.) If a journal copy-editor, unsatisfied with the 
> section-heading and paragraph number, insists on page numbers for the 
> quotes, they can go look them up (when they look up the quote itself, 
> whose wording, after all, even more important to get right than its
> pagination....)


I would go even further than Stevan and say that practically (not in the minds of editors, but as a matter of practical usage fo researchers, not librarians, not editors, not bibliometricists) even paragrph numbering is pointless and unncessary in the new world of OA, if we ever reach it. If one has access to an electronic version of a paper referenced, then quotes or keywords can be searched for in the accesible electronic version.

In computer science the concept of pages has been done away with in a number of new journals. Articles are referenced by article number within volume (i.e. year of publication).

We are getting caght in all these gutenberg-era traps distracting us from providing the most important thing: access to the information. Everything else is simply a matter of having the proper tools available to make use of that access.

We used to worry about findability - Google Scholar pretty much solves that one. If one has even a half-decent reference with author name(s)/title and journal name, then Google scholar will find it if it can be crawled.

We used to worry about finding an element within an article. Syntactic search within an article with appropriately chosen words can not only solve that, but also show where else in the same paper the same concepts were addressed.

All we're missing is the access and that is within our grasp if we as a community would stop worrying about all these mythical problems and deposit.

--
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/