Biodiversity research is supported by an ever-increasing volume of citizen science observations, on platforms such as Waarneming.nl/Observation.org and iNaturalist.org. Taxonomic expertise is essential to sustain these platforms, but can be difficult to spread due to the decentralized nature of many citizen science projects.
In 2022, I started my Master’s in Biology, at Radboud University in the Netherlands where I had just finished my Bachelor’s degree. The Master’s programme includes two research internships of 36 EC (approx. 6 months), both of which include writing a thesis. As I had been working on a database of identification keys, I was interested in a project focused on taxonomy for my first research internship.
This past year was relatively quiet for Citation.js as well. Ulex europaeus , observed December 24th, 2024, Vlieland, The Netherlands. Changes BibTeX: output of non-ASCII characters was improved. BibLaTeX: support for data annotations was added! DOI: the DOI pattern was broadened to include non-standard DOI formats. Support for ORCIDs was improved, making it possible to map authors’ ORCIDs to different formats.
Last year I got a bug report that Citation.js was not working when built in a Next.js production environment for unclear reasons. Next.js is a popular server framework to make web applications with React, and by default transforms all JavaScript files and their dependencies into “chunks” to improve page load times. In production environments, Next.js uses the Rust-based “Speedy Web Compiler” SWC to optimize and minify JavaScript code.
Version 0.7.9 of Citation.js comes with a new feature: plugin-bibtex now supports the import and export of Data Annotations in BibLaTeX files. This means ORCID identifiers from DOI, Wikidata, CFF, and other sources can now be exported to BibLaTeX. Combined with a BibLaTeX style that displays ORCID identifiers, you can now quickly improve your reference lists with ORCIDs.
On the Fediverse, @petrichor@digipres.club posited the question how to include identifiers for authors in Bib(La)TeX-based bibliographies: I have wanted to try including ORCIDs in bibliographies for a while now, and while CSL-JSON makes it nearly trivial to encode, neither CSL styles nor CSL processors are at the point where those can actually be inserted in the formatted bibliography.
Today I worked on three user scripts for Wikidata. Together, these tools hopefully make the data in Wikidata more accessible and make it easier to navigate between items. To enable these, include one or more of the following lines in your common.js (depending on which script(s) you want): mw.loader.load('//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lagewi/properties.js&oldid=2039401177&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
This past year was relatively quiet for Citation.js, as changes to the more prominent components (BibTeX, RIS, Wikidata) start to slow down. I believe this is a good sign, and that it indicates the quality of the mappings is high.
Working on translating a key to the European shield bug nymphs (Puchkov, 1961) I thought I would look for pictures of the earlier life stages (nymphs, Fig. 1) of shield bugs (Pentatomoidea) on iNaturalist and found few observations actually had the life stage annotation.
Ever since I found out about Structured Descriptive Data (SDD) I keep coming back to it. Right now I am planning to make two identification keys, one translated and modernized from a 1961 publication for which I have not found a good alternative, and one completely de novo (well, nearly). In both cases, I started writing out the key in a word processor with a numbered list and tabs and manual alignment etc., but in both cases that
Last november I wrote a blog post about how to model the taxonomic coverage of identification keys. I wanted to model this coverage to be able to determine to what extent an identification key applies to a given observation or specimen, for use in my Library of Identification Resources project. For the same project I also find it useful to be able to archive identification keys.