Limitations to citations in metadata?

[CecSve]

We have an email on helpdesk where they struggle with including all the people who have been involved in a dataset on the IPT:

citation list remains extensive and cannot be fully included in the IPT's citation metadata field.

I am wondering what the limit might be and if a solution could be to upload a file instead? Or do the same limitations exist?

[mike-podolskiy90]

Thanks Cecilie. Could you forward an email to me please? I'm not aware about limits there. I have to check

[ahahn-gbif]

Given it's 40,000 authors (an aggregated dataset from thousands of small submissions that should cite all contributing authors), I don't think it would ever render in GBIF, even if the IPT managed to handle it. I would not approach it as a technical issue with the IPT, tbh, and rather suggest I write to the submitter to find out what exactly their requirements and hoped-for benefits are, and whether we can satisfy those in different ways. Ideas from Daniel collected so far:

• hand-crafted EML? This would probably not render on the page in GBIF (load forever), but we could run a test to verify
  • include the authorship in the description text (freetext, not structured, not included in dataset citation text)
  • journals would request to form a consortium, and cite that one, or abbreviate the list with "et al."; accordingly: would they want to maintain a list in some format on their own site, and include the link in description? again, this will not be cited with the dataset
  • can we do something to register them as citeable authors (OrcIDs), and would that be of use to them?