General info: converting to unstructured citation - Crossref feedback

[Melissa37]

MH: Patent/Clinical Trials/Reports/Conference proceedings/websites/software/Theses - what we provide will be next to useless as it does not fit into the schema, so would it be more useful to convert to an unstructured citation, then we could add the url, for instance, which I see as the most useful piece of information when their is no PID.

Crossref: Yes, that's the best approach - we don't currently index URLs for citation matching but may incorporate that into reference parsing in the future.

[gnott]

I think I've mentioned it before, though I'm not sure if <unstructured_citation> tags should be the only tag in a citation, or whether it as well as other citation tags can be included together. Including them all together is not invalid against the Crossref schema. @Melissa37 do you know if there is a particular preference regarding the unstructured_citation tag?

[gnott]

There's one example on https://support.crossref.org/hc/en-us/articles/213123706-Journals-and-journal-articles where the citations with <unstructured_citation> tags have only the <unstructured_citation> tag. This is some indication of how the deposits should be, but it would be good if we are more sure about it.

[Melissa37]

Are you referring to this:

xml
<citation key="key-10.9876/S0003695199034166-14">
<unstructured_citation>
L. Reynolds, Three dimensional reflection and transmission equations for optical diffusion in blood, MS Thesis. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington (1970).
</unstructured_citation>
</citation>
<citation key="key-10.9876/S0003695199034166-15">
<unstructured_citation>
T. J. Dresse, U.S. Patent 308, 389 [
<i>CA 82</i>
, 73022 (1975)].
</unstructured_citation>
</citation>

? And this suggestion is we could do this:

xml 
<citation key="key-10.9876/S0003695199034166-14">
<unstructured_citation>
L. Reynolds, Three dimensional reflection and transmission equations for optical diffusion in blood, MS Thesis. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington (1970).
T. J. Dresse, U.S. Patent 308, 389 [
<i>CA 82</i>
, 73022 (1975)].
</unstructured_citation>
</citation>

? I don't think I understand as option 1 is much preferable.

[gnott]

I think in issue https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-crossref-feed/issues/116 I think you illustrated my primary question about <unstructured_citation>, and possibly the only remaining question. As an example the question is which of the below examples is preferred by Crossref?

1. All the tags

   <citation key="12">
   <volume_title>PyMol</volume_title>
   <author>DeLano</author>
   <cYear>2002</cYear>
   <article_title>The PyMol Molecular Graphics System</article_title>
   <unstructured_citation>DeLano W. 2002. The PyMol Molecular Graphics System. 
   Schrödinger LLC. PyMol. Version 1.7.4. https://www.pymol.org/.</unstructured_citation>
   </citation>

2. Only the unstructured_citation tag

   <citation key="12">
   <unstructured_citation>DeLano W. 2002. The PyMol Molecular Graphics System. 
   Schrödinger LLC. PyMol. Version 1.7.4. https://www.pymol.org/.</unstructured_citation>
   </citation>

[Melissa37]

Question submitted to Crossref: https://support.crossref.org/hc/en-us/requests/80989

I prefer 1, but we'll ask them :-)

[Melissa37]

From Crossref:

Our system only checks for citation matches among Crossref DOIs. We can match non-journal content (books, conferences, etc.), though journal articles do make up the bulk of our metadata records.

[Melissa37]

So we'll go for option 1

[gnott]

Great, thanks. We're already doing option 1 so let's keep that for now and intend to deploy it as the first go of these unstructured_citation tags.