Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line.

Lars G Willighagen

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.214

Abstract

BackgroundGiven the vast number of standards and formats for bibliographical data, any program working with bibliographies and citations has to be able to interpret such data. This paper describes the development of Citation.js (https://citation.js.org/), a tool to parse and format according to those standards. The program follows modern guidelines for software in general and JavaScript in specific, such as version control, source code analysis, integration testing and semantic versioning.ResultsThe result is an extensible tool that has already seen adaption in a variety of sources and use cases: as part of a server-side page generator of a publishing platform, as part of a local extensible document generator, and as part of an in-browser converter of extracted references. Use cases range from transforming a list of DOIs or Wikidata identifiers into a BibTeX file on the command line, to displaying RIS references on a webpage with added Altmetric badges to generating ”How to cite this” sections on a blog. The accuracy of conversions is currently 27% for properties and 60% for types on average and a typical initialization takes 120 ms in browsers and 1 s with Node.js on the command line.ConclusionsCitation.js is a library supporting various formats of bibliographic information in a broad selection of use cases and environments. Given the support for plugins, more formats can be added with relative ease.

Highlights

All research extends or uses knowledge from other research
Since creating mappings between each format is often unnecessarily much work, Citation Style Language (CSL)-JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) was chosen as a central format
While the numbers may seem low, note that not every CSL-JSON property can be mapped: the intentions behind at least three properties are contested (Wiernik, 2018), the values of two other properties can usually be derived from other fields, ten properties are specific to references and may not apply to resource-describing schemas, and twenty properties could be reduced to just eight with linked data

Summary

Introduction

All research extends or uses knowledge from other research. With the primary goal of scholarly publishing being the distribution of knowledge, it is important that the publications—and the literature they cite—are distributed in an accessible, identifiable and findable manner (Shotton, 2013). While traditionally journals required text-based citations, each formatted in their own specific style, the last few decades the use of Persistent IDentifiers (PIDs) has become commonplace, with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) being the most common for scholarly articles, and International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) for books. These PIDs are linked to central stores that provide machine-readable bibliographic information, such as Crossref and DataCite (Lammey, 2015; Brase, 2009; Neumann & Brase, 2014).

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Conclusion