Welcome to PIDapalooza 2018...where anything goes...as long as it goes on forever.
Citations, the conceptual directional links between citing and cited papers created by the inclusion of a reference in the reference list of the citing paper, are key elements in the scholarly landscape. It is important to discuss citations now, because the Initiative for Open has persuaded almost all the major scholarly publishers to open the reference lists they submit to Crossref, so that Crossref now has about half a billion open references.
Citations need to be treated as first class data entities, so that they can be more readily described, distinguished, counted, processed and analysed. I will present methods of permitting citations to be treated as first class data objects, that include:
being definable in a machine-readable manner – requiring ontology modifications;
being storable, searchable and retrievable – requiring a well-structured open database;
being identifiable – requiring a new a global Persistent Identifier; and
having a Web-based resolution service that takes the identifier as input and returns a description of the citation.
