On Apr 14, 2014, at 11:22, Colin A. Smith wrote:
> On Apr 14, 2014, at 11:01, Christiaan Hofman <cmhof...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Again, the main point is that they are used for searching. That's a
>> repeating action, not a one-time setting. Therefore being short is the most
>> important aspect, and not being really clear in the meaning (that may only
>> be relevant the first few times you use it.) Then you make a connection to
>> these terms in your brain, and use it from then on. For this, it is actually
>> good if they are distinct, rather than looking similar (like CITING and
>> CITED). Now, maybe you can get different and opposite meanings from both CIT
>> and REF, but I already argued that can be said for really any term you make
>> here. So giving up on short and concise to to try being more clear buys you
>> exactly nothing but costs a lot (every time you have to type these few more
>> characters.) From that pov I think CIT and REF look really good. Again, it
>> is not the most important thing that they really have unambiguous meaning.
>> It is more relevant if you can make a clear association in your brain,. just
>> to remember which is which. I have really no problem with that. For me,
>> citations of an article are the ones that cite the article (citingArticles).
>> And reference of an articles are the ones that it refers to, i.e. the
>> bibliography (citedReferences.) I thought these were pretty standard
>> meanings. I am not saying you can change formulations such that these terms
>> may mean the opposite, but that's not what's relevant.
>>
>> Christiaan
>
>
> For the sake of argument, let’s accept those definitions. Each article has a
> list of articles that it references, and a list of articles that cite it.
> Each article also has a list of authors. Using the WOK syntax, "AU=Doe J”
> returns articles that have an author equal to “Doe J” in the author list. By
> that same logic, shouldn’t “REF=WOS:XXX” return articles that have an article
> with ID WOS:XXX in the list of references, and “CIT=WOS:YYY” return articles
> that have an article with ID WOS:YYY in the list of articles citing it? Thus,
> at the very minimum, to be consistent I think the syntax should be reversed
> in your current proposal. You’ve argued that consistency is important, and
> that it doesn’t actually matter so much what the characters are, so would you
> agree that this is a reasonable proposal?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Colin
Yes, you can say that. I already said you can always formulate the terms to
mean the exact reverse. Always. And it again illustrates why trying to be clear
here actually buys you nothing, but it costs a lot. In the end, the user just
has to remember the two terms and which is which, and that needs some mental
image to keep that association. I think in this case this may be strictly
logically true, but I don't think it's useful.
Christiaan
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