How to write a post containing references to journal articles.
I’ve written an article recently about how to cite webpages in scientific articles. Here’s how to do it the other way around.
It’s easy enough to include a link to pubmed referencing the journal article you’d like to discuss(and put rev=’review’ in the link so it gets picked up by postgenomic), but we can get a lot fancier than that. You can actually embed citation metadata directly in your post, and at the same time, provide a link that will resolve to the article in the reader’s local library. This is especially handy for those journals that charge exorbitant rates for online access and for people using Zotero for citation management. Citing references like this is also required if you’re participating in the Bloggers for Peer-reviewed Research Reporting blog post aggregation system.
To embed the citation metadata, you need to put the info in a specially-formatted span tag. You don’t actually have to write this yourself, as there is a service that will take a PMID and return the correct tag. All you do is stick the PMID in the URL, like this, and it returns a code block you can stick in your post. Someone needs to write a plug-in for wordpress that takes PMIDs in span tags and converts them to the appropriate metadata.
Anyone visiting your page with a COinS activator extension will see a link that they can click on to find the article in their local library. To save the citation into Zotero, just click the folder or sheet icon that appears in the address bar of a COinS-containing page, next to where the RSS feed icon appears.
Those practicing open science can also use a WordPress plug-in to enable your own posts to be saved in this fashion. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like, using my modification of Alf Eaton’s greasemonkey script.
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