Citation Typing: progress but we need more uptake

It is now almost thirteen years ago that Prof. Shotton wrote their article about CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology (doi:10.1186/2041-1480-1-S1-S6). For long it was the only article with CiTO annotations in the article itself, explaining why the authors cited those articles, here reference 8 from Shotton's article:

I wanted this. I was collecting reasons why people were citing the Chemistry Development Kit articles. I started using it, CiteULike added support. Sadly, CiteULike got shut down at some point.

Fast forward to 2020, we started a Pilot in the Journal of Cheminformatics to allow authors to annotate their citations as in the above reference 8 with a compact notation (doi:10.1186/s13321-020-00448-1). I have been collecting these explicit CiTO annotations (unlike the post-publication annotations I collected in CiteULike) in Wikidata and summarized in Scholia, and this is what it looks in Wikidata for an article: 

This two year Pilot has now been concluded (doi:10.1186/s13321-023-00684-1) and I wrote a commentary on how authors used it during these two years: "Two years of explicit CiTO annotations" (doi:10.1186/s13321-023-00683-2). I am happy to see authors continue to annotate their article! This below histogram shows the number of articles per year with explicit annotation; besides the Journal of Cheminformatics, you can find additional article on two preprint repositories!

Mind you, I know there are already BioHackrXiv preprints with CiTO annotation in 2023, but I am not keen on putting preprints in Wikidata. I could know, because one is the preprint describing CiTO support in BioHackrXiv (doi:10.37044/osf.io/6rjvc):

So, we are making progress, but a lot needs to happen. We need more journal editors to support CiTO annotation in submissions. For Springer Nature journals this is technically easy, but the (publisher) editors need to monitor the typesetting to ensure the pubnotes do not get lost.

What else? Well, we need databases like PubMed, EuropePMC to support this too. We need some FAIR formats to support sharing post-publication CiTO annotation, like I used CiteULike for, but also done in literature studies, e.g. like this paper by Duca et al.

And we need support in tools like Zotero and EndNote. This is actually non-trivial, because the CiTO annotation is linked to the citation not to the bibliographic information in the tool. So, it needs to be integrated at the level of the Word/Google Docs plugin.

I was also thinking that what I miss is an overview of datasets that use CiTO. Just the list of articles citing the original CiTO paper does not seem to do justice to the use in database.

I have good hopes the story will continue. The wide adoption of Open Science has already taken more than two decades. I can wait a bit longer for wide adoption of CiTO.