Documentation

Citation of sources is a defining aspect of Syriaca.org's approach to digital scholarship. Our editorial principles require that all interpretive claims and collected data published by Syriaca.org include citations to the sources from which they were derived. Our editorial policy is to strongly prefer the use of persistent and durable sources, such as peer-reviewed academic publications or direct citation of primary sources (such as manuscripts), so that all claims can be verified or revised by consulting the original source. The Syriaca.org: Works Cited database is designed to help researchers in identifying the sources used by Syriaca.org.

All digital publications of Syriaca.org share this common works cited database. Each source is assigned a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). Such URIs take the form http://syriaca.org/bibl/\d+ (where "\d+" indicates a unique string of one or more numerals). As an example, http://syriaca.org/bibl/1396 represents the journal article: P. Peeters, "Le martyrologe de Rabban Ṣalība," Analecta Bollandiana vol. 27 (1908), 129-200. The use of shared URIs across Syriaca.org not only ensures standardized citation but also opens up new possibilities for exploring networks of scholarship by enabling researchers to search for topics or Syriaca.org entries which are connected by shared source materials. The Syriaca.org: Works Cited database is designed to make visible these underlying bibliographic relationships and to serve as a tool for analyzing the history of Syriac studies as a discipline.

The bibliographic records published in Syriaca.org: Works Cited have been encoded following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a best practice in digital scholarship. For ease of use, many of the records are also available through a Zotero library which can be downloaded in a number of standard formats including MODS XML, RIS, CSL JSON, and BibTex. For reuse or linking, however, the canonical version of the citation record is the TEI document hosted on Syriaca.org with a URI of the following format: http://syriaca.org/bibl/\d+. When applicable, Syriaca.org has provided links to online versions of the bibliographic item (such as those digitized by Brigham Young University's Syriac Studies Reference Library, Beth Mardutho's eBethArké Digital Library or The Internet Archive). These external links are provided as a courtesy for the user and their accuracy cannot be guaranteed.