Introduction

NUU Citations is a registry of source descriptions. You record what a source is once. The source can be a paper, a lecture, a video, a book, or another work. You record the authors, organisations, platforms, date, identifiers, a short summary, and a longer summary. The record gets a permanent identity. Other people and other NUU tools cite that record. They do not retype the same facts.

Who this is for

This product is for people who work with many sources. You may write. You may research. You may build other NUU tools. You need a stable record of what a source is. You do not want each tool to store its own copy of the same title and authors.

You sign in with your NUU account to create and edit records. You can read public records without an account.

The problem

A source has facts that do not change often. The title is one fact. The authors are facts. The date of publication is a fact. When each person or each tool stores those facts again, the copies drift. Names change spelling. Dates go missing. Two people mean the same paper and cannot prove it.

Citations stores one Description for that source. Everyone who cites the source points at that Description.

Where Citations fits

Citations is the provenance layer in the NUU product family. It holds Description records. A Description is one link in a longer chain of six ideas:

• Citation
• Bibliography Entry
• Description
• Instance
• Version
• Document

The app is the registry for the Description. The other five ideas exist so that you know what a Description is not. A Description is not the file of the work. A Description is not one edition of the work. A Description is not a citation inside a document. Read Core Ideas for the full model.

NUU Profiles and NUU Organisations are related products. A Description can name people and organisations as authors and publishers. Those names can carry a link. Citations does not replace those products.

A companion command line tool lets the same Description live as a Markdown file on disk. You can push the file to the registry. You can pull a Description back to a file. Read Keep a Description as a File.

What you can do

After you sign in, you can:

• describe a source as a Description
• keep the Description private, make it public, or share it with named people
• keep single fields private even when the rest is visible
• find public Descriptions and reuse their identity
• tell two sources with the same title apart

A new Description starts private. Only you can edit a Description that you own. Only you can remove it.

How to start

1. Read Core Ideas to learn the nouns.
2. Follow Describe a Source to record a source.
3. Follow Share a Description if other people must read it.