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Features explore issues raised by news stories in more depth.

A very brief history of Scholarly HTML

A very brief history of Scholarly HTML

The history of HTML begins 1989 at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau and colleagues invented HTML (as well as the transport protocol HTTP and the web browser) to facilitate collaboration between CERN physicists. HTML was originally invented for scholarly communication, but of

Discussing science with microformats

The best and quickest discussions of a scientific paper now sometimes happen in science blogs rather than in the peer-reviewed literature. Whereas we have a number of scholarly databases that track citations between papers, we don’t have the same tools for science blogs. Following all science blogs manually has

The Trouble with Bibliographies

The Trouble with Bibliographies

The bibliography of a scholarly paper is interesting and important reading material. You can see whether the authors have cited the relevant literature, and you often find references to interesting papers you didn’t know about. Bibliographies are obviously also needed to count citations, and then do all kinds of

Discussing WordPress for Scientists

Regular readers of this blog know about my current interest in WordPress as a tool to create scholarly content. In the last few weeks I have released several WordPress plugins for reference management and to create ePub files. Obviously I’m not the only person having this idea. Some interesting

Author Identifier Overview

Today I posted the pre-print of a paper titled Author Identifier Overview that I submitted to the journal Libreas. This is the abstract: Unique identifiers for scholarly authors are still not commonly used, but provide a number of benefits to authors, institutions, publishers, funding organizations and scholarly societies. This report

WordPress for Reference Management

One of the more complicated aspects of scientific writing is reference management – an important limitation of online collaborative tools such as Google Docs. I have argued before that WordPress has the potential to become a great scientific writing tool. Wordpress can’t do reference management out of the box, and

Citations are links, so where is the problem?

Citations are links, so where is the problem?

Citations are a fundamental concept of scholarly works. Unfortunately they are also difficult to do. Traditional writing tools such as Microsoft Word can’t really handle them in a way that is appropriate for a scientific manuscript, and that is why we have reference managers such as Endnote, Zotero or