Handling of reference identifiers (e.g. PMID)

pesho · May 22, 2011

Currently anything that does not map to a specific CSL field is scraped into the 'Extra' (aka 'notes') field. When multiple elements get grouped into the Extra field, there is no way to separate them. For example the PubMed Central translator will put both the PMID and PMCID identifiers into the extra field. So when i try to create a citation style that will include the PMID, the PMCID gets tacked to it (NIH insists on having PMIDs on any aplication for funding).
The is no point in modifying CSL to include variables for all possible identifiers that different online resources may or may not use. Is there a sane way to handle those?

adamsmith · May 22, 2011

currently there is no sane way of doing this. I really wonder what to do about this - it seems like a very real concern to me, but one that's limited to a few select disciplines.

One way forward I could see is to create a new variable/field that's something like "Additional Identifier" that could be used for PMID, Arxiv ID and anything else along those lines - hoping they don't overlap.. I'm not sure how much resistance there is going to be against this, but I feel that dealing with the extra field really is not a solution.

Rintze · May 22, 2011

See also https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/33

The problem with implementing this is there are a lot of possible identifiers, so we'd like to come up with a solution that would be flexible. But as PMID and PMCID are so prevalent, we might want to just add them as CSL variables as a stop-gap solution (which could happen in CSL 1.0.1).

pesho · June 3, 2011

I think there must be a more generic solution. Can we have a variable that has 'key' and 'value' elements (e.g. key='PMID' value='7297137'). My understanding of CSL is somewhat superficial, so I don't know if this is even possible with the current schema.