Note to self (basically rewriting last year's Finding citations of specimens).
Bibliographic data supports going from identifier to citation string and back again, so we can do a "round trip."
1.
Given a DOI we can get structured data with a simple HTTP fetch, then use a tool such as citation.js to convert that data into a human-readable string in a variety of formats.
| Identifier | ⟶ | Structured data | ⟶ | Human readable string |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10.7717/peerj-cs.214 | HTTP with content-negotiation | CSL-JSON | CSL templates | Willighagen, L. G. (2019). Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line. PeerJ Computer Science, 5, e214. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.214 |
2.
Going in the reverse direction (string to identifier) is a little more challenging. In the "old days" a typical strategy was to attempt to parse the citation string into structured data (see AnyStyle for a nice example of this), then we could extract a truple of (journal, volume, starting page) and use that to query CrossRef to find if there was an article with that tuple, which gave us the DOI.
| Identifier | ⟵ | Structured data | ⟵ | Human readable string |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10.7717/peerj-cs.214 | OpenURL query | journal, volume, start page | Citation parser | Willighagen, L. G. (2019). Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line. PeerJ Computer Science, 5, e214. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.214 |
3.
Another strategy is to take all the citations strings for each DOI, index those in a search engine, then just use a simple search to find the best match to your citation string, and hence the DOI. This is what https://search.crossref.org does.
| Identifier | ⟵ | Human readable string |
|---|---|---|
| 10.7717/peerj-cs.214 | search | Willighagen, L. G. (2019). Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line. PeerJ Computer Science, 5, e214. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.214 |
At the moment my work on material citations (i.e., lists of specimens in taxonomic papers) is focussing on 1 (generating citations from specimen data in GBIF) and 2 (parsing citations into structured data).
