alaveteli
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mysociety
Update new.html.erb (extra options when adding citations).
Allow people adding citations to choose "Book" or "Online encyclopedia". Currently, the options are limited to "News story", "Academic paper" and "Other".
Relevant issue(s)
The current options are quite limited. There are a larger number of Wikipedia pages that cite WhatDoTheyKnow requests.
What does this do?
See above.
Why was this needed?
See above.
Implementation notes
I'm not sure what we do with the data that we collect when people submit citations other than displaying the links.
Screenshots
Not needed.
Notes to reviewer
I have very limited knowledge of coding in Ruby. I have simply based the code on the existing options.
There is a model validation for the type field. Would need to update https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/fa6f8d63913f09c5b5ccc31654cf66718ac65abf/app/models/citation.rb#L32-L33 too.
Can I suggest that we add 'Journal' at the same time?
In academic circles, most journals will have a DOI name which will resolve back to the relevant journal entry / edition. This one is perhaps most useful for academics (an important user-group for Pro), but also for those with an interest in digging deeper into the data.
As an example, an article in the Cybersecurity journal has a DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-022-00123-y
(Edit: 'Journal' could partly be covered by 'academic paper' - but not wholly so. It'd be handy to be specific)
We don't really do anything with these yet, so I'm a little hesitant to add too many options when we don't have a clear direction. The main aim of the current options was to align with the main target groups of pro.
This did make me wonder whether we should simplify so that the options are more about subject area rather than medium.
- News (or Journalism)
- Academic
- Campaigning
- Other
I suppose the question is how could the various sites (using Alavetlei) use this information? I imagine it would be useful for annual reports and reporting on impact. For example, a site might be able to say that six newspaper articles, three academic journals and two books cited information released via the the site during the year. I don't think the academic, campaigning distinction would work quite as well.
useful for annual reports and reporting on impact
Yeah, that's what we had in mind, but the first step was more "can we get users & admins to do this linking up work" so haven't thought much past that yet.
I don't think the academic, campaigning distinction would work quite as well.
In this context, yeah true!
Hello @mdeuk - thank you for your feedback. I think you are right some professions have journals that are not quite 'academic' in nature. I have added "journal or periodical".
I think you are right some professions have journals that are not quite 'academic' in nature
I take this point, but I'd be inclined to have "Academic paper, journal or periodical" as a single option. We need to be careful to tread the line between completeness and simplicity. "journal or periodical" is probably quite an alien phrase to many of our users (or indeed, desired users who are put off by such phrasing).
We could tweak "Book" to "Book, magazine or other printed media". I know there's an overlap between periodical and magazine, but I think they're different enough in target audience that 90% of the time it would be clear which to choose?