Re: [jats-list] citation "year" with suffix

Subject: Re: [jats-list] citation "year" with suffix
From: Kaveh Bazargan <kaveh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:54:17 +0530
Hi Nikos

I bow to the volume of data that you have in your organization, and my
exposure to the variety of xml does not compare to yours. ;-)

I agree that for subjects with a lot of legacy citations which cannot
easily be structured, mixed citation might be better, but for STM
research where most refs are structured, I think that it would
encourage more structure. I would like us to try hard to make
something structured and only use <comment> if there is no other
option.

Also I personally think that punctuation does not belong in data
(unless there is no way of structuring). I believe that the Atypon DTD
uses the x tag which makes it easy at least to remove the punctuation,
but for me, putting the punctuation in verbatim in the data goes
against the spirit of structure.

My preference is that at least for normal journal and book citation
which has structure, the data should be pure, and devoid of textual
embellishments like en-dashes and semi-colons. These can be put in by
any intelligent renderer on the fly, and even produce the most
beautiful typesetting. But know there is plenty of "unintelligent"
rendering engines out there that rely on a helping hand from
typographic niceties peppered in the XML. If this is any part of the
reason for leaving punctuation, then it worries me greatly.

And just an example of how ridiculous mixed citation can get, here is
an example from a recently published paper:

<mixed-citation>
US CDC 1990. International notes earthquake disaster: Luzon,
Philippines. Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report 39(34): 573-577.
</mixed-citation>

This has arguably _less_ structure than a printed reference. The
latter at least has bold and italic which hint at what each item might
represent. ;-)

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