Friday 3 July 2015

"That citation doesn't look right" - citation displays in the Repository

It’s sometimes remarked that the “citations” in the repository don’t look right – that they aren’t of a recognised format, or don’t correspond to a particular discipline’s style guidelines. The reason for this, and why we have surrounded the word “citations” with scare quotes is outlined below.

The main purpose of the Repository is to provide a way for published outputs to be made generally available, allowing the dissemination of research from institutional authors. So, the Repository in itself isn’t a citation database. Part of the impact of this is, for example, full names rather than initials being used for staff authors, which is a side effect of the processes necessary to link the Repository to PoA and other institutional processes. All of the information necessary to create a citation can be exported from the Repository, with users able to use that output to create their own citations with whatever tools they wish.

To display the information held about any individual item, the Repository generates a pseudo-citation display, using one overall style. Given the many different disciplines at Liverpool it is impossible to settle on one specific citation style to use as a model that would be acceptable to all, so a generic style has been selected.

We hope that this addresses concerns about the appearance of publication details in the Repository, and welcome feedback on this issue either as comments on these blog posts or via email to irhelp@liv.ac.uk.

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