WP7RefBankOutputFormats

Introduction
Wikipedia provides a useful introduction to citation formats should you want some more background information.

Motivation
RefBank supports reference export in a variety of technical formats, such as BibTex and RIS. In addition, references can be exported in plain text.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that most taxonomists do not use reference manager software. Hence they are not be interested in the variety of technical formats available. Informal discussions indicate that many taxonomists maintain Word documents, or similar, with a list of useful references. Therefore, the plain text export option is the one that is most relevant to their work pattern.

The taxonomists often maintain their references to a common standard, such as Harvard. For these users the ability to export references from RefBank in the more common text formats would be beneficial. Therefore, RefBank should provide the option to export plain text in a variety of styles to meet these users' needs.

Purpose
This is a brief review of citation styles in use to inform the decision as to which should be made available through RefBank export.

RefBank supports the following seven document types:


 * Journal article
 * Journal volume
 * Book
 * Book chapters
 * Proceedings - articles
 * Proceedings – volumes
 * Generic – pamphlet, URL

Therefore, any citation style to be used in the enhanced RefBank export function must support these document types.

Word
Word's built-in reference manager supports several | citation formats. However, from informal discussions, no taxonomist encountered ViBRANT or in BioVeL uses this reference manager, the references are simply maintained as lists in a Word document. Where a refernce manager is used, specific tools such Endnote are preferred.

Samples
From a brief review of university student support web sites, in which students are told how to use citations, four citation formats proved the most popular. (No I don't have the metrics, this is hardly core research.)

Listed below is the same journal article in the four formats, as generated using Zotero.

Harvard Sautter, G., Böhm, K. & Agosti, D., 2007. A Quantitative Comparison of XML Schemas for Taxonomic Publications. Biodiversity Informatics, 4, pp.1–13.

Chicago Sautter, G., K. Böhm, and D. Agosti. 2007. ‘A Quantitative Comparison of XML Schemas for Taxonomic Publications’. Biodiversity Informatics 4: 1–13.

MLA (Modern Languages Association) Sautter, G., K. Böhm, and D. Agosti. ‘A Quantitative Comparison of XML Schemas for Taxonomic Publications’. Biodiversity Informatics 4 (2007): 1–13. Print.

APA (American Psychology Association 6th edition) Sautter, G., Böhm, K., & Agosti, D. (2007). A Quantitative Comparison of XML Schemas for Taxonomic Publications. Biodiversity Informatics, 4, 1–13.

There are many other formats, of course, though these tend to be more specialised, such as AMS (American Mathematical Society) extensively used in mathematics and computer science. As such, these formats need not be available in RefBank.

Both MLA and APA are preferred in the social sciences and humanities, they are less well represented in the sciences. As such, to save coding effort and to avoid over loading the user with too many options, I propose that of the common styles only Harvard and Chicago are supported.

For our work in ViBRANT I propose supporting an additional citation format: that used in Pensoft publications. See the example below.

Pensoft Sautter G, Böhm K, Agosti D (2007) A Quantitative Comparison of XML Schemas for Taxonomic Publications. Biodiversity Informatics 4: 1–13.

Conclusion
RefBank's export facility can be enhanced to support three text citation formats: Harvard, Chicago and Pensoft.

Links to guidelines

 * Chicago
 * Harvard
 * Pensoft

There are many resources describing the Chicago and Harvard styles. The Chicago link above is to the official site. The Harvard link is simply one of many found searching with these terms: harvard citation style guide. The Pensoft link is to their PDF supplied to authors describing the style.