Rogue Scholar references learn new tricks

This week the references included in currently 1,123 Rogue Scholar blog posts have become much more powerful, as they now include the full set of scholarly metadata. These metadata are displayed in the Rogue Scholar web pages and can be fetched via an open API.

One of my favorite personal blog posts – about the 10th anniversary of PLOS ONE, reference lists, and the X-Files TV series written in 2016 – nicely demonstrates this new functionality. On the Rogue Scholar landing page for this post, the 15 references are displayed in a format very similar to Rogue Scholar listings, including abstract and authors. The reference links out to the article or other resource, in the case of Rogue Scholar blog posts the link goes to the Rogue Scholar page for that post.

This functionality is powered by a new database of all Rogue Scholar references in the Commonmeta metadata format, hosted at commonmeta.org and available via the DOI or regular URL, e.g.

• https://commonmeta.org/10.53731/r79z0kh-97aq74v-ag5hb/transform/application/json for this post or,
• https://commonmeta.org/aeon.co/videos/the-strange-journey-of-the-parthenon-marbles-to-the-british-museum/transform/application/json for a video about the history of the Parthenon marbles from Athens (referenced here).

The transform/application/json part of the link triggers content negotiation (using the same link-based format as Crossref), in this case commonmeta JSON. Without that part the link forwards to the resource, e.g. https://commonmeta.org/10.53731/r79z0kh-97aq74v-ag5hb to the post on the Front Matter blog.

As Rogue Scholar references now include standard metadata, Rogue Scholar will be able to export them in other formats in the future, e.g. formatted for a particular citation style, or made available for bulk download to a reference manager.

All references are registered with Crossref and thus support the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). I hope that showing them on Rogue Scholar pages encourages science blog authors to include more references with their blog posts (currently 7% of Rogue Scholar blog posts). Adding references to Rogue Scholar posts is easy, just add a References section with a list of DOI or URL links, the formatting or included metadata don't matter.

References

Fenner, M. (2016, December 23). Mysteries in Reference Lists. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/r79z0kh-97aq74v-ag5hb

Fenner, M. (2024, February 5). New version of commonmeta-py library for scholarly metadata. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/918y1-v4d08

Fenner, M. (2023, March 8). Planetary Defense, Healthy Food, Slime, Software Citation, Parthenon Marbles. Syldavia Gazette. https://doi.org/10.53731/fearkb7-7wz03w9

Fenner, M. (2024, February 20). Commonmeta-py now supports metadata lists. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/b8j4w-zpk40