citing IVOA standards

[Norman Gray]

Folks,

On 2008 Jun 16, at 00:25, Igor Chilingarian wrote:

> There is NO normal way to refer to IVOA documents (recommendations,  
> notes, etc.) in refereed papers / conference proceedings.

I think there is -- you just use the usual citation conventions for  
standards.  For example:

[1] American Psychological Association. Electronic references  
[online]. 2001. Excerpted from 5th edition of the APA Publication  
Manual. Available from: http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html [cited 16  
June 2008].

[3] International Standards Organisation. ISO 690-2 [online].  
Available from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/standard/690- 
  2e.htm [cited 16 June 2008].

[4] B Land. Web extension to American Psychological Association style  
(WEA-PAS) (rev.2.0) [online]. July 2001. Available from: http://www.beadsland.com/weapas/ 
  [cited 16 June 2008].

[5] libsf at web.cc.emory.edu. Citation formats [online]. Available from: http://business.library.emory.edu/eresources/citing.html 
  [cited 16 June 2008].

[6] Robin Fairbairns, editor. UK TEX FAQ: URLs in BibTEX  
bibliographies [online]. 2002. Available from: http://www.tex.ac.uk/ 
cgi- bin/texfaq2html?label=citeURL [cited 16 June 2008].

I have some stuff about this at <http://nxg.me.uk/dist/urlbst/ 
urlbst.pdf>

> 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've noticed that usually there is no affiliations provided for the  
> authors of IVOA documents.

The documentation guide doesn't, as far as I recall, say anything  
about this.  I agree it would be good for document editors to put this  
information in (reproaching myself, too)

> I can't imagine what a referee will think when he/she sees the  
> ``IVOA'' abbreviation for the first time in his life + all these  
> references to the documents available only as HTTP URLs at some  
> strange web-site (ivoa.net) without obvious links to major  
> astronomical institutions.

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].



If there _is_ genuinely a citation problem here -- and I think it  
might be journal editors rather than referees who would be morally  
competent to declare that there is -- then it _might_ be desirable to  
make an IVOA policy of publishing standards documents in some journal  
as they become RECs, or invoke our links with the IAU and get them  
published as IAU documents in some way (I know Rob at least has  
investigated the formal links between the IAU and the IVOA).  I doubt  
that there is a real need for this, however -- the IVOA is the  
competent standards body here, and publishing online is good enough  
for the W3C.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester