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Back to Plenary Participation
Group Session October 29, 2025

Complex Citations – Digging in on the Implementation

Plenary: RDA 26th Plenary Meeting (VP26)

Submitted by
Martina Stockhause
Recording

Meeting objectives

Meeting objectives

The Complex Citation Implementation Interest Group (CCI-IG) was formed to develop and document implementation of the recommendations. The session will build on from IDW 25 and weekly meetings to report on the progress made in requirements for implementing complex citation objects. This will include the development of guidance for workflow actors in how implementation of complex citation may occur across the scholarly process. We will present developments on the metadata structure for complex citations, alongside results from the hackathons in 2025. A group looking at adoption will be started up and we look forward to a discussion around on how ;adoption of complex citation objects could occur.

 

Collaborative session notes:

Open session notes

  • Progressing the Implementation from the 2025 Hackathon
  • Identification of pilot effort
  • Consider forming working groups for specific elements.

Meeting presenters

Shelley Stall (USA), Martina Stockhause (Germany), James Ayliffe (UK), Justin Buck (UK), Lesley Wyborn (Australia), Graham Parton (UK)

Meeting agenda

  1. Welcome and Introduction of the Complex Citations Implementation IG (5 min)
  2. What is a “Complex Citation” and what are the elements of a Complex Citation Object? (5 min) 1-2 slides
  3. Brief review of the recommendations from the former RDA Complex Citation WG: R1 – R10 (10 min) 1 slides – short version
  4. Results of the Hackathon / CCO metadata standard  (20 min) Martina
    • Object Listings / Intra-Relationships / Tooling for Objects
    • Discussion
  5. Update on Implementation Recommendations. (20 min) James
    • Overview
    • Discussion
  6. Update on Adoption Task Team (20 min) Shelley
    • Discussion
  7. Closing Remarks (10 min)

Target audience

All stakeholders: publishers, repositories, infrastructure providers, indexers, knowledge graph providers, scientists

Group Activities and Scope

The Complex Citation Implementation IG aims is supposed to implement the recommendations of the former Complex Citation WG. It  addresses the use case of citing a large number of existing objects (e.g., datasets, software, or physical samples) in a way that allows the credit for individual objects to be properly assigned and enable the Complex Citation the Objects (CCO) to become traceable using Knowledge Graphs. Infrastructure and guidance are still required to make it easier for researchers to use this type of citation and to receive or give credit for the object used in the research. Solving the problem of these complex citation objects is critical to enabling reproducible research. Moreover, enabling these complex citations will be important for researchers to be able to trace citation and usage of their work and report on its impact to funders. For policy makers, it will allow the effects of policy decisions to be accurately tracked through citation and analysis of the supporting data.

Additional links to informative material

Agarwal, D., Ayliffe, J., J. H. Buck, J., Damerow, J., Parton, G., Stall, S., Stockhause, M., & Wyborn, L. (2025). Complex Citation Working Group Recommendation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00130

Short Group Status

Starting in December 2020 during a Data FAIR Town Hall at AGU’s large meeting we reached out across the community for interest in supporting virtual working sessions that would lead to recommendations, adoption, and a better of citing large numbers of data/digital objects in journal articles and other publications. Discussions within the AGU Data Citation Community of Practice (https://data.agu.org/DataCitationCoP/) led to the establishment of the Complex Citations WG at RDA-19 in June 2022 in Seoul, Republic of Korea, which created a series of recommendations that were approved by RDA just before P24 (virtual) in April 2025.

The Complex Citations WG has now completed their recommendations and has transitioned to the Complex Citation Implementation Interest Group to accelerate and develop the technical approach and implementation techniques for adoption across broad disciplines.

Applicable Pathways

FAIR, CARE, TRUST - Evaluation and Policy
Semantics, Ontology, Standardisation
Data Lifecycles - Versioning, Provenance, Citation, and Reward

Avoid conflict with the following groups

Earth, Space and Environmental Sciences Data
Coordinating Earth, Space, and Environmental Science Data Preservation and Scholarly Publication Pro

What potential collaborations or synergies do you see between your Group/Birds of a Feather session topic and other RDA Groups or external organisations?

Earth, Space and Environmental Sciences Data
Coordinating Earth, Space, and Environmental Science Data Preservation and Scholarly Publication Pro
Data Citation WG
FAIR Digital Object Fabric IG
CODATA, STM

Please indicate at least (3) three breakout slots that would suit your meeting.

Breakout 1. Monday, 16 March, 13:30-15:00 UTC
Breakout 4. Tuesday, 17 March, 13:30-15:00 UTC
Breakout 10. Thursday, 19 March, 13:30-15:00 UTC