Communications of the ACM
Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due
"My hope is that our suggestions for automating citations will encourage managers to implement similar systems and make it easier for those using the data to cite it appropriately," says UCSB Professor James Frew.
Credit: James Badham / UCSB
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the University of Pennsylvania, and the U.K.'s University of Edinburgh offer a solution in which citations in academic papers are generated automatically. If today's researchers want to cite the sources of data they use, they might not be able to, because no standard tool exists for generating database citations, says UCSB professor James Frew. The team suggests by using the same computing power that makes databases possible, database citations can be made more specific while also accurately accounting for all data authors.
Frew says this responsibility normally falls to database managers, who would need to define the various ways the data can be viewed, create citation templates for the standard set of views, and provide a computational mechanism to enable researchers to generate citations for specific queries.
The researchers demonstrate the new solution's versatility by applying it to two different scientific databases, which are "radically different in both their structure and how they should be cited," Frew says. "My hope is that our suggestions for automating citations will encourage managers to implement similar systems and make it easier for those using the data to cite it appropriately." The team describes its findings in an article in the September 2015 Communications of the ACM.
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