Mike's Notes
Here are some resources for using OpenCitations.
Resources
- https://opencitations.net
- https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Open_Citation_Definition/6683855?file=12213734
- https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Open_Citation_Identifier_Definition/7127816?file=14151071
- https://zenodo.org/records/6976696
- https://opencitations.net/model
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources
References
- Reference
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
- Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
17/05/2025
OpenCitations
From the OpenCitations Homepage.
OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. It is also engaged in advocacy for open citations, particularly in its role as a key founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). For administrative convenience, OpenCitations is managed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna.
OpenCitations espouses fully the founding principles of Open Science. It complies with the FAIR data principles by Force11 that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable, and it complies with the recommendations of I4OC that citation data in particular should be structured, separable, and open. On the latter topic, OpenCitations has recently published a formal definition of an Open Citation, and has launched a system for globally unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) for bibliographic citations – Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs).
OpenCitations' involvement in international networks and collaborations, together with the need of identifying and reaching out to new stakeholders to assure OpenCitations' development and sustainability, has made it necessary to define OpenCitations' mission, unique strengths and next developmental steps, summarized in the following publicly available documents: OpenCitations Mission Statement, The Uniqueness of OpenCitations and OpenCitations – Present Status and Future Plans.
Please follow us on Twitter and read the OpenCitations Blog to be kept updated with news about OpenCitations!
[Below is an extract taken from the formal definition]
Definition of an open citation
Preamble
- MUST: this word mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification;
- MAY: this word mean that an item is truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item because a particular marketplace requires it or because the vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor may omit the same item. An implementation which does not include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does include the option, though perhaps with reduced functionality. In the same vein an implementation which does include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does not include the option (except, of course, for the feature the option provides).
Preliminaries
A bibliographic citation is a conceptual directional link from a citing entity to a cited entity, for the purpose of acknowledging or ascribing credit for the contribution made by the author(s) of the cited entity. The citing and cited entities may be scholarly publications, on-line documents, blog posts, datasets, or any other authored entities capable of giving or receiving citations.
Citations play a major part in knitting together independent works of scholarship into a global endeavour, and analyses of citations can both reveal how scholarly knowledge develops over time and also be used to assess scholars’ influence and make wise decisions about research investment.
A citation can be:
- directly derived by looking at the reference within the citing entity;
- derived by querying a database containing bibliographic information about the citing and/or cited entity, such as Crossref, if the metadata for such an entity includes details of its outgoing references or of its incoming citation links; or
- retrieved from a database of citation information (a citation index), which will typically contain a definition of the citation itself, information about the citing and the cited entity, and associated metadata.
Within such a citation index, the citation may either be defined as a
relationship between the citing and cited entities, as when using the
property cito:cites in the OpenCitations Corpus or the property cites
[P2860] in Wikidata, or may be defined explicitly as a first-class data
entity with its own properties, as in the as described in the
OpenCitations Data Model (via the class cito:Citation).
In either case, the basic metadata for the citing and the cited entity need to be made available, i.e. sufficient information to create or retrieve textual bibliographic references for each of the entities.
Definition of an open citation
A bibliographic citation is an open citation when the data needed to
define the citation are freely available, downloadable and reusable.
Specifically, such data MUST be compliant with the ‘SSO Principles’
introduced by the Initiative for Open Citations, namely that such data MUST be:
- Structured – expressed in one or more machine-readable formats;
- Separate – available without the need to access the source bibliographic entity (e.g. the article or book) in which the citation is defined; and
- Open – freely accessible and reusable without restrictions, for example by publication under the CC0 1.0 Universal waiver/license.
- Identifiable – the entities linked by an open citation MUST be clearly identified by using a specific persistent identifier scheme (e.g. a DOI) or a URL; and
- Available – it MUST be possible by resolving their identifiers to obtain the basic metadata of both the entities, sufficient to create or retrieve textual bibliographic references for each of them.
