A better way of presenting references

Question

In a field like Health, references are obviously critical. That's not to say they should be necessary in every question (see here for that debate), but the hyperlink 'click here' format in the last sentence is overly obtrusive and isn't consistent with the commonly used medical format.

References should be there when you want them but not distract from the content of the material, and there are ways of achieving this.¹ Should this format or a similar one be added to the Health SE standard, with an easy markup method and button in the bar which appears above the question input:

Answer 1

It is possible to use the following format :

Lorem ipsum reference [1]

by typing:

Reference [[1]]

[1]: http://www.test.com

We should help users find the "how to cite papers", but I do not think a specific UI button is needed for this.

Answer 2

I have mixed feelings about this proposal. Sometimes talking about the reference can provide context for why it's trustworthy, such as in this answer I wrote on Pets.SE.

This context isn't really necessary in a conversation among medical professionals (who all know what a trustworthy source in their field is), but for a mixed site like this, context can help differentiate an answer written from scientific sources from one that just repeats old medical folklore.

Answer 3

I think that any way of doing links is fine as long as you have them in there, but I thought it'd be okay to show how I do it, in case anyone is struggling with another format.

What I do is put <sup>[1]</sup> in my answer where it is relevant, so it will show up like this¹. Then under my answer, I will use footnotes and tell the number of the reference and the name of its page, like this <sup>[1: Example][1]</sup>. Which will show up like this: ^{1: Example}. If I am citing a reference that I didn't directly cite in my answer, I will just use the second half of my referencing style: <sup>[Example][1]</sup>, which will show up like this: ^Example.

I have now created a userscript to do this. Check it out.

Answer 4

What if the link dies? On Stack Overflow, 10% of the links posted here are dead.

I think it is better have the 1 points to a full reference at the bottom of the answer like:

Byers, Tim, et al. "American Cancer Society guidelines on nutrition and physical activity for cancer prevention: reducing the risk of cancer with healthy food choices and physical activity." CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 52.2 (2002): 92-119

Answer 5

@Michaelpri has made a userscript specific for this:

Stack Exchange References

Answer 6

This question was posed in Psychology.SE Meta and I followed the accepted answer with another question about referencing formats (APA as opposed to others).

Referencing styles (using superscript numbers or other inline citations) are down to personal preference in my view. The main point to me is that the reference list needs to be clear.

I think that as long as the reference contains the Author (or movie director) and the year of publication at the front, any referencing format is suitable as long as it contains all the information needed to find the article, book etc. This way, the reference will be easier to pick out, especially when there are multiple references containing the same leading author.

With the fact that formats such as MLA, Chicago, Vancouver and IEEE are very different, MLA, Chicago and Vancouver formats can be very hard to pick out when looking for specific references in comparison to Harvard and APA.

If following a similar format to IEEE, for example

[1] J. U. Duncombe, "Infrared navigation - Part I: An assessment of feasability," IEEE Trans. Electron. Devices, vol. ED-11, pp. 34-39, Jan. 1959.

even though the [1] will be within the main body of the posting with or without a <sup>), the author and year of publication should still be at the front changing the IEEE reference above to

[1] J. U. Duncombe (1959) "Infrared navigation - Part I: An assessment of feasability," IEEE Trans. Electron. Devices, vol. ED-11, pp. 34-39

This way, because author and year is together, the reference will be more easily picked out in the list.

Be careful with this formatting though

As you will see if you was to click edit at the bottom of this answer, you will have to "escape" the square bracket at the beginning if you have links within the posting which are not inline links i.e. you would need to type \[1] instead of [1]

I would suggest that if using this format, you should always escape the first square bracket to prevent issues.

********Providing Links********

As pointed out by @FranckDernoncourt within the answers here, there is an inherent problem with answers on the site having links which go dead because either the page was moved or it was deleted by the website owner.

Where a link is provided, where possible, rather than a direct link to the article, it is preferable to provide one or more of the following:

• PMCID link (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ followed by the PMCID),
• PMID link (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ followed by the PMID number), or
• DOI link (https://doi.org/ followed by the DOI number)

for example

Lewis M. J. & Phillips J. E. (2012). Older people's cardiac responses as indicators of stress in familiar and unfamiliar environments. Psychophysiology, 49(4): pp. 478-483
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01321.x PMID: 22176515

with the link for DOI number 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01321.x becoming https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01321.x

PMCIDs, PMIDs and DOIs are generally updated if the website owner moves the document within their website.