Citation metadata retrieval using Zotero / MediaWiki infrastructure

[dhimmel]

Was talking with @adam3smith at FORCE2018. He is an expert with CSL styles, having written hundreds himself.

We were discussing metadata retrieval and he discussed the work going at Zotero, which is bundled into https://github.com/zotero/translation-server. MediaWiki also has a derivative of this, updated less frequently, called Citoid.

translation-server can extract bibliographic metadata from many types of resources / URLs. However, there is no public instance (we'd have to run one). Citoid doesn't update as frequently but has a public API.

No immediate plans to use this infrastructure, but wanted to jot these notes down before I forget. Thanks @adam3smith for all the amazing info!

[agitter]

Very interesting. There are definitely some longer term possibilities there.

One short term idea would be to use Citoid to add ISBN support, which has been a previous feature request (most recently in #68). It's probably using the WorldCat Search API. I tested it at https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Citation/getCitation. Some examples worked better than others. For instance, the bookdown example was missing the publication date.

We would also need to look at the mapping between Zotero field names and CSL. That should be more straightforward than bibtex.