The 'API team' at the hackathon had the following on their wish list:
"Consistent citations for studies. Some are Authors, title, journal, vol, pg, year. Some are authors, (year), title, pages, etc. Can they either be made consistent or (better!) be made into a bibtex string or at least some easy XML-type structure? Would save a call to CrossRef API to simply get the correct citation."
At the development hangout on 9/22, we agreed that we don't want to get into reference normalization because (a) there are too many format choices and we don't want to develop an elaborate infrastructure for this, (b) this is not a high priority feature and we probably won't ever get around to it, and (c) Crossref will do a much better job than we will so as a question of division of labor it will be better if clients get the reference from Crossref.
So our advice is that you should do the appropriate Crossref API call.
However this leaves us with a work item, which is to document how to get the reference from Crossref. I propose creating a new wiki page specifically about DOIs and references that the API documentation can link to (under the /studies/ methods).
Note that maybe 5%-10% of references have no DOI so are lost causes in any case. Also if you don't like the way a reference is written you can edit it in the curator app.
jar398
commented
10 years ago
The 'API team' at the hackathon had the following on their wish list:
"Consistent citations for studies. Some are Authors, title, journal, vol, pg, year. Some are authors, (year), title, pages, etc. Can they either be made consistent or (better!) be made into a bibtex string or at least some easy XML-type structure? Would save a call to CrossRef API to simply get the correct citation."
At the development hangout on 9/22, we agreed that we don't want to get into reference normalization because (a) there are too many format choices and we don't want to develop an elaborate infrastructure for this, (b) this is not a high priority feature and we probably won't ever get around to it, and (c) Crossref will do a much better job than we will so as a question of division of labor it will be better if clients get the reference from Crossref.
So our advice is that you should do the appropriate Crossref API call.
However this leaves us with a work item, which is to document how to get the reference from Crossref. I propose creating a new wiki page specifically about DOIs and references that the API documentation can link to (under the /studies/ methods).
Note that maybe 5%-10% of references have no DOI so are lost causes in any case. Also if you don't like the way a reference is written you can edit it in the curator app.