citing IVOA standards

[Norman Gray]

Igor, hello.

On 2008 Jun 16, at 22:38, Igor Chilingarian wrote:

> 1) IVOA Recommendation.

> 2) IVOA Note.

I agree that in most formal circumstances, it would only be  
appropriate to cite a Recommendation, and either of the forms of  
citation mentioned in this thread would be able to make clear the  
nature of the document.  However, there doesn't seem to be any need to  
forbid other documents, even Notes, from being cited, if the citing  
author thinks it appropriate.

> 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.

One of the peculiarities of the IVOA document process is that all  
version numbers are constrained to be of the form n.nn (0 <= n <= 9).   
I happen to think this prescription is a bit nuts (a version string is  
a tuple of integers, not a real number), but in this case it has the  
fortunate side-effect that an IVOA document version number is always  
four characters.

> 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.

That sounds like an _excellent_ reason to me.

Best wishes,

Norman


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