Citations and reference lists can seem like a dull topic, but they have always been important. Several speakers at Blogtalk Downunder (gosh, that conference seems wayback now) mentioned the need for people to cite references more adequately on the web. Granted, those speaking were describing the need for references to be cited in students’ blogs to maintain academic integrity, but it applies to all blogs that link or reference another work.

At the moment, people tend to link to another site, but provide no additional details unless they are writing in an electronic journal. This relies on the linked site providing the required details in an easy-to-find place, the reader clicking the link if they want to find out more, and on the link being non-crucial to an argument should it ever disappear. This also hampers the ability of blogs and webpages to move into more scholarly spheres (that is, if they want to).

The main reason why ideas and quotes are cited and referenced in full, in a standard format, is so that the reader can find them again. Citation should be encouraged on the web to save the time of the reader (so they don’t have to click a link to see where a quote or idea is from) and to provide details so that if the page moves the reader could perform a search to try and find it again (since it is unreasonable for bloggers and writers to keep checking old links after material is published, as it is in the print world).

There are two main challenges - a lack of information on some sites and a lack of built-in citation tools in blogging software.

I’ve been using CiteULike, Connotea and del.icio.us a lot lately to see what capabilities they have that could solve this problem. One idea could be to link to references at those sites instead of linking directly to the object. So for example, if I wanted to mention a First Monday article, Finders Keepers I could link to the URI or even DOI at Connotea which would give the citation as well as the URL before going to the article. What’s even more useful about these sites is that they can import and export to bibliographic managers (I use Endnote, though I’m looking into BibTeX) and they can import directly from some major databases like Ingenta Connect.

What’s still missing is a way to grab the bibliographic data and have it dynamically display as a reference link in a page, and then to link back to the record on CiteULike etc. The idea would be that if you printed a site, all the references would be grabbed and listed at the end of the article instead of having to click each link and get the citation.