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title: "Citations and addressability"
layout: post
image: 
    feature: header_crossref_labs.png
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What is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his [history of the footnote](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674307605), "the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them" (233). So the point of a footnote/citation is to be able to lookup and check that epistemic claims are true? Sometimes. But not always, no.

Citations fulfill multiple roles. They do have an addressability component; it's important to be able to find something. Knowing which volume, issue, and page a particular fact is sourced from allows for speedy lookup -- especially if, in this day and age, there's a URL or DOI.

However, citations don't _have_ to have this addressability component. You can cite things that are impossible to look up. Copies of works that have been totally destroyed can be cited. You can also cite things that have not yet been "born"; "in press" citations do this frequently. Regardless of how much someone wants to check your citation, it is not accessible to them -- there is no way of fulfilling that epistemic check function that Grafton assigns.

What do such non-deferenceable citations show or prove? They might signal a sort of privileged access -- the person who has access to the forthcoming "in press"/"in print" work. Or they might signal exceptional library access -- the only remaining copy of Book X by the famous Greek philosopher Κανείς Γνωστός. But what about when we cite things that don't exist (anymore)? An edition of the Iliad known only by reference?

Such citations are a scholarship based on faith -- which isn't terrible, if the faith isn't misplaced. Perhaps the citation in question is to something that truly _was_ referenced but isn't there any more. But what about referencing things that never could be accessed. These citations _look_ the same as regular citations, but of course are actually very different in practice. In the age of ChatGPT and other generative text engines, [which can fabricate citations](https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12359), these citations continue to proliferate.

In this sense, citations are a weak assertion in the metadata ecology of scholarly communications. They are a distributed economy to which anyone can contribute. Every time someone cites something it begins the process of constituting new metadata about that object. However, whether an object actually exists at the centre of that citation web is a matter that metadata cannot resolve. I know that my colleague, Prof Roger Luckhurst, has certainly "cited" humorous non-existent objects. There's one in [my forthcoming book](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Metaphors-Digital-Textual-History-Stanford-Technologies/dp/1503614883/ref=sr_1_1).

Crossref's metadata registry -- in which third parties register such metadata, at a cost -- is one way of making it _more_ likely that citations are addressable. Having a registry of objects pushed by the entities that published them is a much sounder way of getting good metadata about the solidity of a cited entity.

Of course, if you don't have _access_ to scholarship, all citations become faith based. This has been one of the reasons that I have advocated for open knowledge practices.