Adoption of the Citation Typing Ontology by the Journal of Cheminformatics

© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creat iveco mmons .org/publi cdoma in/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. As authors, we cite literature for many reasons. The reasons are normally positive: it supports a statement we make in our article, the new work extends earlier ideas, or the cited paper outlines a method or a dataset we use. Sometimes, however, we cite an article differently, such as when we disagree with the conclusions from that article. Citations help us find more information about a concept and allow individual journal article to focus on the new content. Furthermore, they position the new work in its historical context and citation analyses can point us to research topics we would otherwise not have thought of [1]. Of course, citations have found additional uses that stem from the idea that articles that are cited a lot may be important. If we assume that all citations to an article are positive, this is a logical conclusion. However, citations are not always positive. We can cite an article because we disagree with the statements. For example, a 2011 paper in Science about the possible inclusion of arsenate ions in DNA has seen mostly disagreeing citations [2]. Then the article is important for a different reason. This was picked up 10 years ago, when Shotton et al. published an ontology that formalizes a hierarchy of reasons: the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO, purl. org/spar/cito) [3]. This ontology defines a citation as the act of citing some article. That allows one to make statements about the citation, in a machine readable way. Using the CiTO we can say the citation is neutral (cito:citesAsAuthority), positive (cito:confirms), or negative (cito:disagreesWith). The ontology also allows us to indicate reuse of methods and software (cito:usesMethodIn) and data (cito:usesDataFrom). This, of course, is closely related to recent efforts in data citation [4] and software citation [5]. The adoption of the CiTO, however, has so far not been wide in publishing. CiteULike [6] was one of the first tools that had support [7]. It allowed users to create citations with CiTO typing (see Fig. 1).