How to cite versioned documents - an example from a biological wiki

[Daniel Mietchen]

Dear colleagues,

if a wiki contains information originally published elsewhere, the
question arises how the updated wiki version of such information
should be properly cited.

The Species ID wiki ( http://www.species-id.net/ ) has recently, in
collaboration with the journals ZooKeys and PhytoKeys as well as the
Plazi repository, imported a number of taxonomic treatments as wiki
pages, and the above-mentioned issue was addressed by incorporating
the generic link to the wiki page into new journal publications, and
providing a suggested citation format on-wiki that includes the
original work along with a permalink to the most recent wiki version
and the wiki contributors until that version.

For some example pages, see
http://species-id.net/wiki/Neobidessodes_darwiniensis or
http://species-id.net/wiki/Sinocallipus_catba .

The publisher's news release on the matter is at
http://www.pensoft.net/news.php?n=53 , and I have commented in my blog
at
http://www.science3point0.com/evomri/2011/04/16/citing-versioned-papers-robots-and-reviewers/
, touching upon the need for a tailored karma system.

Comments and suggestions very welcome.

With my best wishes,

Daniel

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[Andra Waagmeester]

I have recently posted a related question on biostar, a question-answer forum on bioinformatics. (http://biostar.stackexchange.com/questions/6062/how-do-you-acknowledge-biostar-and-its-contributors-in-your-research-output). 

One of the answers (http://biostar.stackexchange.com/questions/6062/how-do-you-acknowledge-biostar-and-its-contributors-in-your-research-output/6075#6075) mentions a nlm citation standard on blogs, that might also be applied on wiki content. 

There will be a workshop on tracking impact on the web in june (http://altmetrics.org/workshop2011/). We have submitted an abstract based on the input from our question on biostar.

Regards,

Andra

2011/4/17 Daniel Mietchen <daniel....@googlemail.com>

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[Daniel Mietchen]

Hi Andra,

thanks for the pointer. The NLM citation standard that you quote
actually has even a section on wikis (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7266/#A61267 )
but does not address the issue of how to cite content that started out
elsewhere and has continued to evolve on a wiki, as discussed at
http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.90.1369 .

I know about the altmetrics workshop and am considering to attend.

Daniel

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[Sriram Kosuri]

Several years ago, I and other's in my lab tried to publish links to permanent wiki articles on openwetware that contained original data (there also have been lab notebooks posted on the site). At least my experience was that they wouldn't accept those links as legit citable references.  These particular papers were sent to NPG journals, and we had to link from a more permanent repository like MIT's DSpace which had doi's.  We looked into getting doi's for each page edit on openwetware for a while, but it seemed to be too expensive to host a doi server (and all the regulation that goes along with it).  

That said, later other's in our lab definitely had cited protocols on openwetware (see ref 28. at http://www.jbioleng.org/content/pdf/1754-1611-3-4.pdf ).  So I think it depends on the journal and it might be getting easier and easier to do.  That said, if someone figures out how to get cheap DOI's that would solve most of the problem (some old info can be found here: http://openwetware.org/wiki/DOI ).

In terms of who get's credit for a wiki article, that's a whole other can of worms.  If you dig deep, you can find a lot of discussion about such things in the early days of OWW.  I don't think we ever came up with an elegant solution though.

Thanks,

Sri