Two years of explicit CiTO annotations

Abstract

Citations are an essential aspect of research communication and have become the basis of many evaluation metrics in the academic world. Some see citation counts as a mark of scientific impact or even quality, but in reality the reasons for citing other work are manifold which makes the interpretation more complicated than a single citation count can reflect. Two years ago, the Journal of Cheminformatics proposed the CiTO Pilot for the adoption of a practice of annotating citations with their citation intentions. Basically, when you cite a journal article or dataset (or any other source), you also explain why specifically you cite that source. Particularly, the agreement and disagreement and reuse of methods and data are of interest. This article explores what happened after the launch of the pilot. We summarize how authors in the Journal of Cheminformatics used the pilot, shows citation annotations are distributed with Wikidata, visualized with Scholia, discusses adoption outside BMC, and finally present some thoughts on what needs to happen next.

CiTO support for BioHackrXiv

“…Despite the long history, it is not widely used yet. The Springer Nature Journal of Cheminformatics, however, ran from 2020 to 2022 a pilot with using CiTO annotation (Guha et al, 2023;Willighagen, 2023Willighagen, , 2020. As part of this pilot, Lua scripts were developed that would allow the citation typing to happen when the citation was made.…”