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Hi,
Sorry if this has been discussed before. I want to cite the nLab in a paper. Is there a standard way to do this?
I am aware of efforts to have a ’journal of the nLab’, which I think is a great idea, although I haven’t been following the progress of this. Is there any suggestion that this could be adapted for ordinary nLab pages, as if to rubber-stamp them ’this page has been reviewed by experts in the community and been considered high-quality’?
Cheers, Jamie.
I don’t think there is an established convention for how to cite Lab pages. But one thing to keep in mind in any case is that you may want to cite a specific version of a page, to have a guaranetee that the content won’t change in the future, if that is important. You get links to all the existing versions by clicking on “History” at the bottom of any Lab page.
As for the Publications of the Lab, the official home page is Publications of the nLab. Currently you’ll find precisely one published article there. One more is currently in the refereeing system.
Is there any suggestion that this could be adapted for ordinary nLab pages, as if to rubber-stamp them ’this page has been reviewed by experts in the community and been considered high-quality’?
Yes. This was one of Urs’ original motivations for the journal. It would be interesting to go through the process for this, is there a particular page that you are thinking of?
Oh, I had over-read that part of Jamie’s message.
The web for peer-review of Lab pages is nLab-reviewed.
Sure: Jamie’s citation could be a good occasion to clean up that page and have it reviewed
Definitely cite a specific version and date. Unfortunately instiki does not produce a permalink for the current version of a page. (However, if you look at how links to past versions appear in the History and hack a link to the current version following that pattern, then it will work.)
I myself would not accept the rule of citing the version. I think the nLab is going to improve in future and every next version is better, so unless one referring to some peculiarity, precedence issue or alike, it is better not to direct to an obsolete version of a page but simply to the default newest version of the page. The list of the references is a service to the reader.
References serve two purposes:
For the first, it is important to know which version of the nLab page the author used. It may be that we’ve completely changed the page since then and the result that the author quoted has been changed. So for that reason, the version should be made clear. However, I agree that for the second reason, then the page without the version is more useful.
I think that the Wikipedia model on this is to say something like “Wikipedia page (accessed at date)”. So we can have “nLab page (version X)”, with the first part linked to the current page and the second linking to the version itself (or some variant of this style that wasn’t confusing - I’m not proposing an actual scheme here).
I would love to see references in papers divided up into something a little more useful according to what standing the reference has in the paper. There could be sections:
The names are deliberately chosen to be similar to what you get if you do aptitude show perl on a Debian-based system.
For the first, it is important to know which version of the nLab page the author used. It may be that we’ve completely changed the page since then and the result that the author quoted has been changed. So for that reason, the version should be made clear.
You are talking idealistically. In reality people look at references quickly and if you give a particular URL, even if their need is different (say to learn the state of the art) they will tend to look at that cited, obsolete, version. They will not make a science out of citation and its usage. Plus the format of the references often needs to be short as possible, and I often had to dispense on some references because an editor wanted me to dispense on the print size of the reference list. So I’d rather dispense with some details than a whole reference.
So I guess it all works out when in the bibitem you give
the URL to the current version
and in text (without URL) say “version ”.
This way the hasty reader who does not care too much about checking results or the like will easily find the current version. Whereas the reader who is determined to find out which precise result and source the author means will thereby also have the energy to understand what “version ” means and to go to its URL and find it.
I agree with Urs 10, and particularly with the need to give the precise version.
I like Urs’s proposal. I would not make it a mandatory rule, but a good advice for a quite wide range of situations.
We have no power to make a rule, only to offer advice. I agree with the advice in Urs #10, at least if #8 (two links) is impractical (such as on physical paper, especially when space is short).
Sounds good to me. I’ve recorded this at FAQ#Citing.
I would love to see references in papers divided up into something a little more useful according to what standing the reference has in the paper.
Hehe! That would be neat. Some papers might fall into more than one category, though.
You know, we could implement Andrew’s suggestion for papers in the nPublications….
I’ve recorded this at FAQ#Citing.
Nice, thanks.
Right, ideas in 8 are great. Some scientist count he citations on equal footing. Textbooks, wrong papers, essential papers, surveys on the same footing.
I sometimes see books (monographs) whose bibliography’s bibliographies are broken down something like this.
apostrophe! >:(
Apparently my mind knew that there was a possessive somewhere, and I put no apostrophe in ‘whose’.
Hi all, thanks for these comments. Sorry I wasn’t able to reply earlier to this thread.
The particular article I want to cite is the following: 2-limit
I too think Urs’ suggestion #10 is a sensible way to go.
Don’t forget to tell us when you post the article somewhere, and when it gets published. Who knows, someday we might be able to compute a “citation index” for the nLab[1]!
[1] With the intention of thereby demonstrating the utter inanity of citation indexes.
One thing that might make single or double linking easier would be if the Instike software was updated to indicate the version number at the bottom (rather than having to figure it out by looking at the history). For example the page action at the bottom says
Revised on October 24, 2011 14:13:43 by Urs Schreiber (89.204.153.107)
This could be changed to
Version #19, October 24, 2011 14:13:43 by Urs Schreiber (89.204.153.107)
to make the version number more explicitly available and to provide a link to the version without having to figure it out and construct it by hand. Note that slightly further down the page is says:
Edit | Back in time (18 revisions) | See changes | History
which can be somewhat confusing because (18 revisions) in this case means 18 other versions, or that if you don’t count the first version as a revision then there are 19 versions, 18 of which are revisions.
One could refer to the time and date of a revision, instead of a number, but that perhaps looks a bit odd in a reference.
MO question about citing the nLab: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/298384/is-it-possible-to-cite-a-page-in-n-lab-in-a-research-paper/298390
I added some possible BibTeX to my answer; it might helpful to include such at FAQ#Citing as well. Does anyone have any improvements to suggest?
Re #25: Looks fine to me. Perhaps simply “nLab” rather than “nLab authors” in the author field, but I suppose that you considered this already?
I can add something like ’Bibtex entry’ to the menu at the bottom of current and revision pages to output what you suggest for each page, if people think this would be a good idea? If so, how would people like the output to be: a text file which downloads, a page within the nLab (not necessarily a typical nLab page, but something like the recently added /author pages for example) with just this Bibtex entry as its contents, or something else?
I wrote “nLab authors” rather than “nLab” because I figured that the author field should be a person or a group of people, which the nLab is not.
A Bibtex link at the bottom of nLab pages is a great idea! Most journal web sites which have an “export citation” feature seem to do it by a downloadable text file; personally I would prefer just a web page with some plaintext that I can copy and paste, but either way is fine.
A Bibtex link at the bottom of nLab pages is a great idea! Most journal web sites which have an “export citation” feature seem to do it by a downloadable text file; personally I would prefer just a web page with some plaintext that I can copy and paste, but either way is fine.
Now implemented. In the menu at the bottom of every page or revision page, there is now a ’Cite’ option, which leads to a page at a new /cite endpoint with a .bib entry for ascii and unicode. See the menu at the bottom of étale cohomology for example, or étale cohomology (revision 31). Direct links to the ’cite’ page in these two cases are
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/%C3%A9tale%20cohomology/cite
and
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/revision/%C3%A9tale%20cohomology/31/cite.
Just let me know suggestions for improvement.
The month and year for the citation to a specific revision (rather than the current page) need to be set to the date of the revision, not the current date; I’ll fix that tomorrow. I’ll also post to github then; a bit too tired for that now. To handle unicode to ascii/latex conversion, since there is no generic way to do it, I’ve basically just hard-coded the conversion for every non-ascii symbol currently occurring in a page title (my favourite is 道德经, for which I’ve simply used the romanisation); it will be great if someone can look over that when I post to github, because I’ve not tested my hard-coding for all the possibilities.
That looks good to me. I especially like that the Home Page has a ’cite’ button as a general citation to the nLab should direct to that page. Great.
Thanks for the feedback, Tim!
I’ve now tidied up a few things, including providing the correct month and year when citing a specific revision (as mentioned in #28), and pushed the commit to github.
The unicode-to-ascii/latex hardcoding that I mentioned in #28 is in this file, in the method on lines 112-186 for ascii, and lines 215-296 for LaTeX. Hopefully it is fairly clear what is going on even if you do not know Python or how to program: a line
"ß": "ss"
for example means replace ß by ss. Just ask if you would like me to explain something.
Please do check these conversions: for example, as mentioned in #28, I have not checked the LaTeX that results for most of them. I have attempted to make the conversions as uncontroversial as possible: if there is any possible reason for discontent that I am aware of, I have gone with the simple ’remove the diacritic’ or ’find the closest looking symbol in ASCII’ approach. For Norwegian letters å, æ, ø I have converted to aa, ae, oe, and similarly for German ä, ö, ü (handling some exceptions for Finnish in the first case), because these are standard. If you disagree with anything or wish to correct it, just let me know here and I’ll make the change; or, even better, make a pull request at github!
Thanks for doing this, Richard!
I’m a little confused – why is there both an ascii and a latex conversion in the source? Is the ascii version used at all? The version of the generated bibtex labeled “ascii” seems to actually contain tex code for the accents (as it should).
I seem to recall that in Bibtex it is better to write {\"o} than \"{o} for some reason, although I don’t remember why right now. Maybe it works better with the alpha citation package? I also seem to remember that to enforce capitalization it is better to write {Word} than {W}ord, but I also don’t remember the reason for that.
You’re welcome!
I’m a little confused – why is there both an ascii and a latex conversion in the source? Is the ascii version used at all?
The ascii conversion is used in the citation key, i.e. in the line
@misc(nlab:etale_cohomology,
in the case of that page. Specifically, the replace_unicode method is used in the bib_entry_citation_key method.
The latex conversion is used for the page title itself, and there is a url encoding for the links.
I seem to recall that in Bibtex it is better to write
{\"o}than\"{o}for some reason, although I don’t remember why right now. Maybe it works better with the alpha citation package? I also seem to remember that to enforce capitalization it is better to write {Word} than {W}ord, but I also don’t remember the reason for that.
OK, thanks, I can make those changes when I get the chance. I think I actually usually write {\"o} and not \"{o}! Or if you or anybody else would like to do it, feel free (just let me know, so we don’t duplicate the work needlessly)!
Ah, I see, thanks.
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