A Modest Proposal for a Hyperlink-based Citation System

Citations for the modern age

Old Citation Systems Solve Old Problems

Citation systems serve a valuable purpose: enabling a reader of a text to review and contemplate the source of the claims upon which the text is based. Standard citation systems¹ do this well, but it is clear that they were made in an era of physical information storage. The APA format², for example, has very clearly had its guidelines with respect to electronic sources tacked on in an ad-hoc manner³, and it is considerably easier to use it to cite physical sources⁴. A fully hyperlink-based system, like the one I am proposing, would logically extend this ease of reference to digital material, rather than trying to glue a digital arm onto an inherently phsyical system.

Proposed System

This isn’t a new idea, and the utility of hyperlinking to provide citations in hypermedia has been widely discussed. However, I want to add a little spin on the existing ideas of hyperlinking names of sources or parenthetical references: hyperlinking the entire section of text deriving from a given source. This includes quotations, figures, paraphrasing, and anything else that isn’t analysis, criticism, or new conclusions. Features like Scroll to Text Fragment make it easy to immediately jump to the piece of text that is being referenced, enabling faster lookups⁵ and easier validation of sources (i.e., whether or not the current author is misrepresenting the views of the cited article⁶). Furthermore, it creates an obvious visual cue as to what is old and what is new⁷, which is useful for distinguishing whether or not the content of an article is anything new or interesting⁸, or for speeding up cycle time when following the three-stage strategy. It also makes citation analysis easier by embedding the links directly in the papers, so tooling can be re-used from search engines and web crawlers⁹.

Is Anyone Going To Use This?

No, probably not. Tragic, but we can throw this idea in the bin of “things hypermedia¹⁰ could have enabled but didn’t because of social forces”. Many such cases