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