Tracking citations, to all research output

While Nature calls for more action on open metadata (doi:10.1038/d41586-022-02915-1), the concept of open citations remains a central feature of our knowledge dissemination. After the wild success of the Initiative for Open Citations (and still excited that the ACS joined eventually!), it is time to move on. Currently, the open citation metadata is focusing towards journal articles (yeah, we've heard that before), but citations to research output in general is important. It's the scholarly implementation of learnability, perhaps. DataCite (doi:10.1045/january2015-brase) and Software Citations (doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.86) are migrating from great ideas, to actual adoption. But we have a long road ahead.

With the new WikiPathways (see this Scholia overview of literature) website looming, we started talking about citations to pathways in WikiPathways. Some five years ago I played with this idea, and recorded some "pathway citations" in Wikidata (SPARQL query):

Basically, a WikiPathways is a machine-readable literature review, or at least some are. And sometimes there is considerable effort in such a pathway. There is a lot of things to be worked out, however, because the pathways can have revisions, etc. So, like with books, the "edition" (how we call revisions with books) may be important to track. On the old website, this was possible.