Glossary

bibliographic item

Document metadata for purposes of referencing or citing. Corresponds to BibliographicItem instance.

citation

Sometimes not quite correctly used as a synonym for bibliographic item.

docid

document identifier

Identifier of a document.

A document can have multiple identifiers (e.g., a DOI, an ISBN, etc.), and sometimes a single identifier can be shared by multiple documents (however, such an ambiguous identifier should not be primary, or it should be reported as a data integrity issue).

Identifiers are listed under BibliographicItem.docid, and each identifier is a relaton.models.bibdata.DocID instance in Python.

primary document identifier

Main characteristics of a primary identifier:

• Its id can be used to unambiguously reference the document.

• A primary identifier is expected to be universally unique to this document.

This service displays primary identifiers without identifier types, as types tend to be self-explanatory.

The id value of a primary identifier uses format more or less similar to NIST’s PubID (possibly the only strongly standardized identifier format). It always starts with a prefix that denotes schema/document family.

In Python, such identifiers have their primary attribute set to True.

docid.id

Refers to relaton.models.bibdata.DocID.id.

document identifier type

docid.type

The type component of document identifier, contained in docid[*].type field of bibliographic item’s Relaton representation (field type in Python).

Document identifier type in Relaton is a somewhat murky concept. In case of a primary document identifier, its type tends to be used to reference a namespace or registry (e.g., DOI, ISBN), and in other cases used to reference a publishing organization (e.g., IETF, IANA).

Examples: IETF, IEEE, DOI.