Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Citations, Social Media & Science

Quick note that Morgan Jackson (@BioInFocus) has written nice blog post Citations, Social Media & Science inspired by the fact that the following paper:

Kwong, S., Srivathsan, A., & Meier, R. (2012). An update on DNA barcoding: low species coverage and numerous unidentified sequences. Cladistics, no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2012.00408.x

cites my "Dark taxa" in the body of the text but not in the list of literature cited. This prompted some discussion of DOIs and blog posts on Twitter:



Read Morgan's post for more on this topic. While I personally would prefer to see my blog posts properly cited in papers like doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2012.00408.x, I suspect the authors did what they could given current conventions (blogs lack DOIs, are treated differently from papers, and many publishers cite URLs in the text, not the list of references cited). If we can provide DOIs (ideally from CrossRef so we become part of the regular citation network), suitable archiving, and — most importantly — content that people consider worthy of citation then perhaps this practice will change.