
The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the Age of Google - diodorus
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-future-of-academic-style-why-citations-still-matter-in-the-age-of-google
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NoGravitas
IMO the biggest problem with modern citations are unstable URLs. The best you
can do for a lot of sources is to cite the URL, _and the date and time it was
retrieved on_. Then all future readers can do is either hope the resource
pointed to by the URL has remained stable, or is in archive.org.

And don't get me started on SPAs. Google Books goes out of its way to provide
citable URLs, but it's very easy to envision a similar service that doesn't.

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mwest
In academia this is something that DOIs (see
[https://www.datacite.org/](https://www.datacite.org/)) solve quite neatly.

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IanCal
DOIs don't solve mutable content, do they? They help solve problems around
ambiguity, but there's nothing inherent in DOIs that stops you from
updating/removing the content behind the scenes. I think the only way it helps
the problem is that if you're abusing it you'll have the ability to mint DOIs
revoked.

~~~
verisimilidude
Fundamentally, you are correct.

In the current environment, most DOIs are issued by established journals,
backed by relatively mature publishing software that knows how to keep a DOI
up-to-date. Therefore, empty DOIs are not much of a problem at the moment.
Also for the moment, DOIs are far more reliable than URLs. URLs are terrible
for citations, often going dead before an article is even published.

However, like you say, I could easily envision a future in which the current
environment breaks down, new kinds of sites with less reliable software start
issuing DOIs, DOIs go stale, DOIs don't adapt to changes in content models,
etc. DOIs feel more like a band aid than a permanent solution.

Long-term, I like the idea of publishing articles on a system like IPFS, where
the content determines the address via hash, that doesn't change, and any
publishing system that needs to cite an article could hopefully just "pin" it
for preservation. Perhaps you keep immutable copies of your article revisions
in IPFS, and marry them together via a mutable IPNS interface for consumption.
This would assume all articles are open access, maybe, but that wouldn't be a
bad thing.

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x1798DE
Does an IPFS system allow you traverse the revision tree? I think the ideal
system would be one with a canonical identifier plus a content / version based
identifier, so that if, for example, there is a retraction, you will know that
by visiting the current version, but if you want to see the cited version,
that is also available.

~~~
IanCal
That's something that would be possible with IPNS (which allows a mutable
'pointer' to an IPFS hash, though this is just my lay understanding).

This way your IPNS address becomes your DOI equivalent, but also providing the
IPFS hash would give a static reference to exactly what it was you saw.

There are some kinks here, as there isn't currently a way of verifying that
the IPFS hash given was seen at the IPNS address. You also can't take an IPNS
address and get all previous versions. It does sound like that's possible to
add to IPNS, but is a future plan. It would be a step forwards from the
current system though.

A bit of info on IPNS, which is in really quite early stages afaik:
[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxd...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdXBFca7D/example#/ipfs/QmQwAP9vFjbCtKvD8RkJdCvPHqLQjZfW7Mqbbqx18zd8j7/ipns/readme.md)

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nailer
The amount of supposedly technical people who 'cite wikipedia' \- something
wikipedia itself advises against - is astounding.

It would help for wikipedia to let users pick a style and provide a citation
UI, giving users copypasta to cite the real sources for any given section of
text.

~~~
a_imho
Indirection is the least of my concerns using wikipedia citations. More often
than not the cited sources are down or paywalled, in some cases the editor
using the context is just plain wrong (without assuming agenda or bias
cherrypicking) about the implications, or the sources are changed
retroactively.

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pducks32
Couldn't a hash work for immutability? Like an md5 hash of the text?

