Adoption of the Citation Typing Ontology by the Journal of Cheminformatics
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Journal of Cheminformatics Open Access
EDITORIAL
Adoption of the Citation Typing Ontology by the Journal of Cheminformatics Egon Willighagen*
As authors, we cite literature for many reasons. The reasons are normally positive: it supports a statement we make in our article, the new work extends earlier ideas, or the cited paper outlines a method or a dataset we use. Sometimes, however, we cite an article differently, such as when we disagree with the conclusions from that article. Citations help us find more information about a concept and allow individual journal article to focus on the new content. Furthermore, they position the new work in its historical context and citation analyses can point us to research topics we would otherwise not have thought of [1]. Of course, citations have found additional uses that stem from the idea that articles that are cited a lot may be important. If we assume that all citations to an article are positive, this is a logical conclusion. However, citations are not always positive. We can cite an article because we disagree with the statements. For example, a 2011 paper in Science about the possible inclusion of arsenate ions in DNA has seen mostly disagreeing citations [2]. Then the article is important for a different reason. This was picked up 10 years ago, when Shotton et al. published an ontology that formalizes a hierarchy of reasons: the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO, purl. org/spar/cito) [3]. This ontology defines a citation as the act of citing some article. That allows one to make statements about the citation, in a machine readable way. Using the CiTO we can say the citation is neutral (cito:citesAsAuthority), positive (cito:confirms), or negative (cito:disagreesWith). The ontology also *Correspondence: [email protected] Dept of Bioinformatics‑BiGCaT, NUTRIM, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 50, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands
allows us to indicate reuse of methods and software (cito:usesMethodIn) and data (cito:usesDataFrom). This, of course, is closely related to recent efforts in data citation [4] and software citation [5]. The adoption of the CiTO, however, has so far not been wide in publishing. CiteULike [6] was one of the first tools that had support [7]. It allowed users to create citations with CiTO typing (see Fig. 1).
Adopting the CiTO If the past 10 years has shown anything, it is that the activity of scholarly communication via journal articles is not easily changed. Whether it is widespread adoption of data repository, minimal reporting standards, or freely sharing citations, the interest may be there, but the uptake is slow. The OpenCitations project [8, 9] and Initiative for Open Citations [10] show how hard it is to change the momentum. And while CiteULike introduced support for the CiTO, other references managers have not (yet). A chicken-and-egg situation may be an underlying issue: if there are no providers of CiTO annotation, why should tools that work with citations use it? And at the same time, if there
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