Rich Citations: Open Data about the Network of Research | PLOS Tech

"Why are citations just binary links? There’s a huge difference between the article you cite once in the introduction alongside 15 others, and the data set that you cite eight times in the methods and results sections, and once more in the conclusions for good measure. Yet both appear in the list of references with a single chunk of undifferentiated plain text, and they’re indistinguishable in citation databases — databases that are nearly all behind paywalls. So literature searches are needlessly difficult, and maps of that literature are incomplete. To address this problem, we need a better form of academic reference. We need citations that carry detailed information about the citing paper, the cited object, and the relationship between the two. And these citations need to be in a format that both humans and computers can read, available under an open license for anyone to use. This is exactly what we’ve done here at PLOS. We’ve developed an enriched format for citations, called, appropriately enough, rich citations. Rich citations carry a host of information about the citing and cited entities (A and B, respectively), including ..."