User:Forbes72/doi

Why good citations are important

This page mainly concerns Wikipedia citations as used in physics. For a general background about academic citations, see: Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines. This provides a good goal to work toward. In practice, many citations fall short of the standard. Some examples: while it is a common practice in print journals to use ISO-4 abbreviations in citations, this can be confusing to a general audience, and is discouraged on Wikipedia. If a publisher hosts a journal article, it is generally better to link to it through a digital object identifier rather than a simple url, because the identifier has more resistance to link rot. Sometimes articles are cited without a title, requiring them to be located by volume and page. This can lead to a lot of confusion. (e.g. a citation may use translated name of a non-English journal, but there may be an English language journal with the same name) The goal of the citation is to make verifiability as easy as possible.

Pros and cons of doi

Where it exists, the most generally useful identifier to include in a citation is the digital object identifier. This has a bunch of advantages, being machine-readable, unambiguous, unique, and providing some access to the source itself. There is a lot of useful general information about current use of doi citations at Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia. There are two main issues with the doi though.

First, that not every article has a doi. While the vast majority of English-language peer reviewed articles published today have a doi for every article, the coverage becomes much more spotty for both foreign language and older articles. A typical example is older volumes of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics. From 1997 forward the journal is published by Springer, and so volumes 84 and up all have dois. The older articles are in fact freely available [1], (in both Russian and English translation) but apparently lack a doi. Many journals that lack dois are just very small journals: e.g. Revista Mexicana de Física [2] or the Romanian Journal of Physics [3].

Second, the doi may link to a paywalled resource, when free alternatives are available. For newer articles, arXiv often provides free access, while for articles with expired copyright, repositories such the Internet Archive or HathiTrust are often useful. So for paywalled articles, it is good to check if the article is freely available somewhere. However, this not an immediate concern, as simply adding the doi can make it easier for a bot to come through and add a link to a free resource later.

Citer and semi-automated references

Filling out a cite journal template can be done by hand, but it is time-consuming and prone to error. If a doi exists, the citer tool usually makes citing sources significantly easier. This is open source, at github. On the back-end, it pulls metadata from Crossref and reformats it for Wikipedia. Simply putting in a doi usually gives a usable full citation which can be copy-pasted into the body of a Wikipedia article. However, the system has some quirks that mean it is usually advisable to check the output before copying it blindly:

• Articles published by American Physical Society and Scientific reports are often missing page numbers. This happens when the metadata contains an "article-number" field rather than the usual "page" field that citer uses in citations.

10.1103/PhysRevA.66.032111

10.1103/PhysRevB.63.104420

10.1103/PhysRevC.82.015208

10.1103/PhysRevD.58.096004

10.1103/PhysRevX.4.021013

10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.021801

10.1038/s41598-019-55300-w

• Articles published by the Royal Society of London and American Association for the Advancement of Science are sometimes missing authors:

10.1098/rsta.1970.0068

10.1126/science.287.5455.1024

• Citations by World Scientific are sometimes listed in all capital letters:

10.1142/S0217979291001085

10.1142/9789814439688_0003

• Non-basic roman characters like ä,ö,ü,é often end up garbled and have to be manually retyped:

10.1007/BF01374560

10.1051/jp2:1993211

• Journal citations are generally more reliable than conference citations or book citations, which very often have incorrect or missing information.

Despite the issues, this is usually the fastest way to get a full citation. Other things that help improve citations:

• add |doi-access=free for open-access journals
• add |display-authors=5 for articles with a long author list
• add in collaboration names with the |collaboration= parameter
• add other identifiers such as |arxiv=, |pmid=, |mr=, etc.

Working without dois

Providing good access to sources without a doi is also possible, but can be more difficult. When the article or abstract is available from the publisher in English, it is best to link directly to that. However, in other cases it is necessary to look further. As an example, consider the citation: (found here)

Belov, N. V., Neronova, N. N., and Smirnova, T. S. (1955). “1651 Shubnikov groups,” (In Russian). Trudy Inst. Kristallogr. Acad. SSSR 11, 33–67.

The first step would be to find the journal name. In general, for a foreign language journal, there are a variety of possible names. Possibilities include: the journal title in Cyrillic characters, the journal title transliterated into Latin characters, the title transliterated into Latin characters and abbreviated, and the title translated into English. It's also important to find out if the reference refers to the original paper or a translations of the journal, because (as with Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics) the translations are sometimes published with page numbers different from the articles they are translated from.

In this case, the journal is an abbreviation of the transliterated Russian title. Unfortunately, the journal is not indexed in English anywhere online. However, in this case, an English language abstract is in fact available online at the Central Intelligence Agency's reading room, based on a Freedom of Information Act request concerning one of the authors [4] (page 43-44).

In general, there are no comprehensive databases for such sources, and it comes down to web searches, physical libraries, or knowledge about where to find related material. As stated before, a good starting point is the Internet Archive or HathiTrust are often useful for access to old titles that may be hard to find elsewhere.