Tomorrow's Citations

J. WILLIAMS, Ph.D. | BIO | EMAIL  | UPDATED date

An analysis of existing citation styles has motivated the design, from the ground up, of a convenient architecture for online citations and references that

• promotes evidence-based communication on the Internet
• is widely applicable beyond research communities

The architecture provides one document view for authors and another for readers. A real-time transformation converts the author's view to a corresponding reader's view. It sorts the references and equips each in-text citation with a mouseover note that displays its corresponding reference. References are annotated with icons automatically gleaned from links to the referenced content.

Readers of the transformed content see references with five elements: titles, links to representations of cited content, contributors, publishers, and dates. The titles and links come first, as these are the elements emphasized in search engine results.

The document Tomorrow's Citations: Reference Examples provides a pleasant introduction to the citations and references of the new architecture. Here is a labeled screenshot of a subordinate reference in the form of a mouseover note. Notice that the note begins with the title of the reference's corresponding root parent reference:

The architecture is presented in Tomorrow's Citations: Preliminary Guide for Content Creators. The underlying research is presented in Tomorrow's Citations: Architecture Development. Its conclusion identifies crucial differences between traditional citation styles and the tomorrow's citation architecture.

All three of these documents are self-illustrating. The reader sees not the author's view in which these documents are maintained but the corresponding transformed reader's view produced by the real-time transformation algorithm. In the reader view, citations have the form of "dagger" page notes.