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

The relatively simple archicture is based on 30 insights gleaned from an analysis of existing style guides.

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 mouseovern note for the subordinate referenncee. 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.