Hi Gregor, I must be getting dense, but I'm not sure I completely follow what you are getting at here. Perhaps the word description is confusing me.
A 'micro'citation should follow some standard, which is what, I think we are trying to set here for the community as a whole, whether it matches what one journal dictates that we put into a taxonomic treatment or not.
When it comes to languages, a work (as we all realize) may contain several languages. Even a single taxonomic treatment may contain several languages (if the overall language is, for example, German, a description or diagnosis in Latin, and localities are written in the language of their country of origin). Are you suggesting that we include all languages here (I can see the point of that for level 3, but for level 1 and probably even for level 2, I can't see much point in having anything more than the overall language added (in the example above, German).
Cheers, Anna
"Gregor Hagedorn" G.Hagedorn@BBA.DE 15-Feb-2006 7:46:45 AM >>>
Thanks for this. The main question I think needs to be clarified is how much flexibility a data provider is to be allowed in completing the human-readable string. Clearly we do not expect to be able to perform direct string comparisons between two provider's citations, so are these just recommendations of components that should be included, or is the intention to mandate a particular sequence of elements? Which ones are considered (at least more or less) mandatory, and which are optional? I guess we should provide some actual examples of "complete" and "partial" citations and state whether they are regarded as sufficient.
I agree and think in the contrast to the list cited by Anna a typical free-form source description would rather follow established printed publication standards (some Journal standard) and would typically NOT include a "type of publication" (in software like RefMan or EndNote typically an enumerated value, but no common language vocabulary in printed publications exists to my knowledge).
So reformulating it as recommendation, I suggest to recommed adding information if the description is in a different language than the publication itself. This is quite common, most English/German/French etc. publications will cite Russion/Greek/Japanese/Chinese etc. publications either transliterated or translated. Preferred way to indicate this would be welcome.
Gregor---------------------------------------------------------- Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn@bba.de ) Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Königin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203
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