3 Wikidata and Open Citations
Jere Odell; Mairelys Lemus-Rojas; and Lucille Brys
Open Citations
Before defining the concept of “open citations,” let us pause to think about what we mean when we talk about citations in scholarly communication librarianship. A “citation” is a reference that an author makes to a work that accounts for a source of information that the author notes, disputes, or otherwise uses in a new work. To a degree, these references also give readers enough information to find the cited source–including, perhaps, the author, date, title, publication or publisher, and the relevant page number(s).
Each of the references (or citations) in a work also form a data element—at its most basic level, a reference becomes an item in a list. Lists of citations to and from works have long been valuable tools for readers. These have been published as “indexes” (especially for religious and common law use) for hundreds of years (Hass Weinberg, 1997). In parallel with the availability of computing technologies in the mid-twentieth century, Eugene Garfield proposed a citation index for science in 1955 (Small, 2018). In 1963, Garfield launched the Science Citation Index, the precursor for what would become a widely used suite of citation databases, the Web of Science (currently owned by Clarivate). Along with later systems, like Scopus and Dimensions, these indexes and databases provide a proprietary, closed system that enables citation metrics, citation networking, citation-based studies of disciplinary development, and the citation-based rankings—a set of methods and measures broadly known as bibliometrics, scientometrics, or infometrics (Hood & Wilson, 2001).
Although proprietary systems like Web of Science and Scopus provide database driven citation linking, they are far from “open.” These databases are paywalled, limited to a controlled list of sources, and largely closed to contributors. In contrast, “open citations” are neither a proprietary database nor closed to new sources—in other words, any publication that meets the technical requirements can make their references available as open citations.
Open citations, however, are more than a reference list that anyone with internet access can read. They are also linked-data that can be discovered and displayed by search tools. To be truly an “open citation,” the elements of a reference must be structured (in a machine-readable format), separate (online apart from the original source document), and open (available for reuse without restriction). In addition, to complete the linkages of a fully networked body of open citations, the cited and citing works must be identifiable with available metadata retrievable from a persistent identifier, such as a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or a Handle (Peroni & Shotton, 2018).
Open Citations for Scholarly Communication
Citations provide authors with a method for attribution, readers with a tool for discovering related works, and researchers with an indic