Re: citing IVOA standards

Hi Norman and Igor,

Norman Gray wrote:
> On 2008 Jun 16, at 00:25, Igor Chilingarian wrote:
>
>> Our documents don't have bibcodes, therefore they are not listed in ADS.
>
> Having bibcodes would be nice, I agree. What do the ADS folk think
> about this?

I am certainly not opposed to putting some of these documents in ADS. However, the problem with trying to assign bibcodes to them is that these drafts don't really fit the model of the traditional publications.   To me they look like the documents published by the W3C, whose basic metadata is hard to capture in a single bibcode. For instance, how do you differentiate one document version from another? It would be much easier if we were talking about IETF RFCs.

Anyway, let us think about this issue a bit and see if there is a logical way to make this work.

> I think that something like the following would be perfectly acceptable.
>
> [std:ucd] Sébastien Derriere, Andrea Preite Martinez, and Roy Williams,
> editors.
> UCD (Unified Content Descriptor) — moving to UCD1+. IVOA Recommendation,
> 2004. [Online]. Available from:
> http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/UCD.html [cited June 2008].

This is certainly one acceptable style. The W3C documents use this format (as a comparison):

[SRD]
     SPARQL Query Results XML Format, D. Beckett, J. Broekstra, Editors, W3C Recommendation, 15 January 2008,
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-rdf-sparql-XMLres-20080115/ Latest version http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-XMLres/ .

The notable difference is the referencing of the versioned URL as well as the latest one. It may be worth explicitly mentioning in each IVOA document how it should be cited ("cite as...").

Thanks,

• Alberto

-- 
Dr. Alberto Accomazzi                  aaccomazzi(at)cfa harvard edu
Project Manager
NASA Astrophysics Data System                        ads.harvard.edu
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics      www.cfa.harvard.edu
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