Citation capture: what's in a name? Citing collections consistently for greater impact

The view from lunch

This was a one day workshop at The National Archives to explore the findings and recommendations made in the report Citation capture: enhancing understanding of the use of unique and distinctive collections within academic research published in 2018 by RLUK, TNA and JISC. It brought together practitioners from across the research lifecycle to look at the future direction of this work and how it might be taken forward. I particularly appreciated the chance to network with a wide range of practitioners on this topic.


As anyone who works in Special Collections will know, there is no standard way of capturing citations recording use of our collections. This makes it difficult to demonstrate impact (particularly crucial for funding applications) and meet KPIs, as well as understand how collections are used.


Some repositories do provide guidance on citation, but this often has poor visibility and is not provided pro-actively to users. Many currently depend on researchers telling them about citations (which is our current approach at work, although we do follow up pro-actively with researchers who have given their consent).


The report identified that there is no silver bullet in terms of tools and platforms. Two key approaches were identified in the report:

• 3 letter code
• ARCHON code (a unique code that each repository already has, but which would mean academics would either have to find the correct code to cite (they aren't intuitive, ours is 1975!) or the code would need to be included within catalogue references.

Then, several speakers talked about the implications around citation capture for their particular area:
Eleanor Harris (Herefordshire Record Office) - using citations for internal advocacy
Christina Kamposiori (RLUK) - measuring impact for Special Collections
Michael Rowlinson (University of Exeter) - quantitative capture of citations to archival material via Google Scholar
Jo Pugh (TNA) and Ben Crabstick (JISC) - citation capture in practice
Frances Madden (British Library) - persistent identifiers in an international context
It was very clear that improving the way in which citations are captured which make a big difference to a wide range of institutions holding archives. It would improve internal advocacy (as evidenced by the Herefordshire Archives example, where they had used citations as evidence to show the true extent of their users and the impact of research done using their collections), show that archives inform research that ends up in highly cited articles, raise awareness of the role of libraries and their collections in creating impact, learn more about researcher behaviour and interests, and the relationship between cataloguing of collections and use.


In our groups, we then went on to consider the best way forward. One possible route would be to include widgets in catalogues, for example Discovery and ArchivesHub, to make citation much easier. Another would be to involve publishers. By the end of the day it had been decided that JISC, RLUK and TNA would coordinate sorting out the requirements, and it was recognised that it would need to meet the needs of all types of organisation (eg, not every archive has its own catalogue, and it may not be online).


One to watch with interest!