citing IVOA standards

[Igor Chilingarian]

Hi Norman and Alberto,

Thanks to all who answered, including Bob and Francoise who wrote me directly.
I'll try to be clear in this mail.

I understand the difficulties assigning bibcodes to different versions of the 
documents in the process of standardisation, WD and PR in particular. However, 
let's start with 2 simple cases, which are easy (I believe) to handle.

1) IVOA Recommendation. This is *a kind of* a final version of a document, or 
at least, let's say, a major milestone. This has all the attributes of a 
``normal publication'': authors, editors, title, date. Plus: version, URL. 
Moreover, I would say that IVOA Recommendation has to be considered as a 
refereed source, since it passes through RFC period and TCG which is much more 
tough than a "standard" referee report for a research paper.

2) IVOA Note. This is a contrary example. For IVOA note there is no need to 
track the version number, since IVOA notes are not working drafts so in 
principle they shouldn't "evolve". Therefore, it should be easy to assign a 
bibcode as well. Of course, this is not a refereed publicaion.

I like Norman's idea of using a version number in the bibcode, however there 
may be some drawbacks connected to the possible hierarchical nature of version 
numbers, i.e. 0.9.3b or something like this.

Why I decided to raise again this issue: the reason is simple (and stupid) -- 
I don't want to lose my citations / publications, neither wish my colleagues 
do so. And I do think that being a co-author of a IVOA standard is much more 
than to write yet-another-{A&A|MNRAS|ApJ|etc.}-paper and it requires much more 
efforts and much more resposibility.

"C'est la vie" -- when you apply for a job in astronomy, referees/committees 
are checking your publication list and citations. And they do it using ADS. 
ALWAYS ADS and ONLY ADS.

With best regards,
 						Igor

On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Alberto Accomazzi wrote:

> 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] S?bastien 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
> 60 Garden St, MS 67, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
>