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DCMI Citations Working Group

Citation Qualifier Proposal - 2000

Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative - Citation Working Group

01 February 2002

Editor: Ann Apps < [email protected]>

Status of this document: Information
This is previous work by the Citation Working Group. It will not be taken forward by DCMI.

Description: Proposal for Dublin Core™ Citation qualifier made in 2000 and DC8 community approval.

Comments and feedback should be sent to the working group mailing list, < [email protected]>, the archives for which may be browsed at < http://jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-citation.html> (NOTE, you must be a member of the WG to post messages to the WG) or, alternatively, send your feedback to the Editor of this Working Draft.

Proposal for a Citation Qualifier (2000)

The original DC Citation Working Group was set up in November 1998 and was responsible for identifying standard methods for including bibliographic citation information about resources in their own metadata, and related problems of identifying resource version information. The group concentrated specifically on an article's placement within a journal, volume, and issue. The group made several proposals for qualifiers to the Dublin Core™ Metadata Element Set (DCMES) to achieve this aim [1]. Specifically:

  • In the metadata for an article, DC.Relation.isPartOf could indicate the SICI, DOI and/or URL for the issue. Then, the metadata for the issue could indicate "isPartOf" the DOI and/or URL for the volume. Similarly, the metadata for the volume could indicate the ISSN, DOI and/or URL for the journal.
  • Full citation information, including the page range (or other equivalent locator information for non-page-based articles) should go into DC.Identifier. Encoding this information in DC.Identifier recognises the fact that the citation information of journal title, volume number and start page effectively identifies a journal article.
  • Furthermore, the working group recommended that DC.Identifier have an Element Qualifier of DC.Identifier.citation for the citation string.
  • The text string that follows could also comply with a DC Citation Scheme (or Value Qualifier set) to specifically indicate the structural components of the citation, such as Journal Title (full and abbreviated), Journal Volume, etc. Specific title abbreviations can themselves be referred to external schemes, such as ISO 4, Index Medicus, Chemical Abstracts, Vancouver, World List, and so on. (Not all these schemes are well documented on the Web, they are mentioned here solely to indicate that there are a number of possible "standard" ways of abbreviating journal titles.)
  • Other Identifiers could also of course go into DC.Identifier since all DC tags are repeatable, so the SICI, PII, DOI and/or URL for the article could also go here. (Note: in the metadata for an article, the SICI, for example, that is entered into DC.Identifier is the SICI for the article, but the SICI that goes into DC.Relation "isPartOf" is the SICI for the issue.)
  • Chronology should be indicated in DC.Date.
    The working group agreed a possible structured-value set:
  • JournalTitleFull
  • JournalTitleAbbreviated
  • JournalVolume
  • JournalIssueNumber
  • JournalPages
    with the associated semantic definitions of these terms. While this set does not cover every eventuality it deals with the vast majority of cases and will give (together with the article metadata in DC.Title, DC.Creator and DC.Date) complete information for any reference-citation record that anyone might want to extract.

DC8 Citation Plenary Session

At the plenary session of the DC8 Workshop in Ottawa, there was open discussion on the DC Citation Working Group's recommendations detailed above. A number of options as to the appropriate DC element for a journal article's bibliographic record were identified:

  1. Option 1. dc:identifer, with full bibliographic information: Journal Title, Volume, Issue, Page Range. These would be encoded as a text string with this default order not as structured values.
  2. Option 1a. dc:identifier.citation, with full bibliographic information as above.
  3. Option 2. dc:relation.isPartOf, with full bibliographic information as above (ie. including Page Range).
  4. Option 3. dc:description containing Page Range only, plus dc:relation.isPartOf excluding Page Range.
  5. Option 3a. dc:identifier containing Page Range only, plus dc:relation.isPartOf excluding Page Range.
  6. Option 4. dc:relation with a new relationship qualifier, AppearsAs, with full bibliographic information as above.
  7. Option 5. DCCite.citation, ie. a new domain specific element.
  8. Option 6. dc:description, with dc:relation.isPartOf bibliographic information excluding Page Range but optionally and/or URI and/or SICI.

This was followed by an audience vote. The first vote, in which people could vote for more than one option or none, was for any option they could "live with". The second vote, in which one vote only was allowed, was for their preferred option. The votes were as shown in the table below.

Option Vote 1 Vote 2
Option 1 31 6
Option 1a 53 50
Option 2 19 5
Option 3 7 3
Option 3a 1 0
Option 4 22 1
Option 5 3 1
Option 6 31 13
Abstentions 3
The results fairly conclusively showed a preference for Option 1a. A more detailed report to the working group after DC8 may be found in the dc-citation email archive [2]. ## References

[1] Morgan, C. DCMI Bibliographic Citations and Versions Working Group, Qualifier Proposal. November 1999. dc-citation email archive
[2] Morgan, C. Report to Citation Working Group post DC-8. December 2000. dc-citation email archive