[Dspace-general] "Citation" Input Box

[Richard Jones]

Hi Marty,

> Has anyone created (or thinking about creating) a custom submission form
> that prompts the submitter for individual elements of the citation
> rather than relying on a single "Citation" input box?

Although we are not doing this through the DSpace submit UI, we are 
collecting elements of citation data as separate metadata fields.  I've 
then written some (configurable) code to generate the 
identifier.citation field from that source data, which means we can 
enforce the style of the citation.

> For example, instead of seeing the "Citation" input box, the submitter
> might see several input boxes, such as
> 
> Article title:
> Journal title:
> Volume No.:
> Issue or Issue No.:
> Year:
> Starting Page:
> Ending Page:
> 
> Another way to ask the question: Does the single "Citation" input box
> work ok?  My concern is that users could enter all sorts of malformed
> citations in a single input box.  Providing a separate input box for
> each citation element would likely yield more complete metatdata and 
> is similar to the interface for entering citations into bibliographic
> database management programs such as EndNote, RefWorks, etc.
> 
> This approach seems easy to implement for a single format, e.g.,
> articles, but it gets tricky to carry the same approach through
> multiple formats within a single submission form.#

Automatic citation generation can be tricky, hence the existence of 
systems like this: http://citationmachine.net/.  But a simple solution 
which loaded different (locally configured) forms of citations for 
different parameters (e.g. submission type) could be doable.

Cheers,

-- 
Richard
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