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Given the large number of possible styles for citations in many different fields (APA, MLA, AP, IEEE, etc.), it's difficult for academics and information science professionals to keep track.

It would clearly be beneficial to standardize some of these styles between fields (while leaving old citations as-is to save efforts). Would this be practical, given the different uses of information in each of these academic disciplines?

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"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Computer Networks, 2nd ed., p. 254) ... Somewhat snarky, I know. :-) – ksclarke May 23 '12 at 15:23
The problem that I see is that any unified or harmonized standard will itself be a citation standard. If the existence of N standards is a problem, the existence of N+1 standards is unlikely to be a solution to that problem. – Ben Ostrowsky May 23 '12 at 15:32
@BenOstrowsky A good point. I had envisioned a scenario where the older methods would be considered "legacy" and no longer employed. – jonsca♦ May 23 '12 at 15:34
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xkcd.com/927 – John Flatness May 25 '12 at 3:17

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It would be beneficial, but there's too many different groups who all think they know what the right way is to do things, and as it works for them, they have no reason to change.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical, as I work in science archives, and we're actually trying to get standards considered for data & software citation ... but the way that you subset data varies by discipline (it's not as simple as page numbers), so we're likely going to end up with many incompatable citation standards.

I would suggest that you use citation management software, and if you want people to cite your work, offer the necessary metadata in BibTeX. You can then emit your list of references in whatever format a particular journal needs.

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Good suggestion, I was just thinking more in the hypothetical. – jonsca♦ May 23 '12 at 2:32
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In the long run, I think attempts to get unique and universal identifiers, like DOIs, in all citation formats are going to make the presentation text largely irrelevant. Best bet is to double down on getting these unique identifiers further adopted. – Trevor Owens May 23 '12 at 15:33
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The thing is, because all of these professional organizations think they're special & know the one true way to document sources, third-party reference management solutions have to step in & unify things since one source can be cited in numerous ways. Zotero's Citation Style Language is one example but there are others. I wish those types of standards would overtake all the journals & associations with their own quirky citation styles. – phette23 May 23 '12 at 15:53
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The Citation Style Language (CSL) is one approach to standardize citation styles by formal description of these styles. This allows to support zillions of citation styles as citations can automatically be created in any style that has been formally defined. In a nutshell, CSL works as illustrated below:

                        citation style 
                        (defined in CSL)
                               |
                               v
 bibliographic data  ---> CSL processor ---> citation
(in CSL input format)                        (in the specific style)

Up to now there are more than 2000 citation styles defined in CSL. CSL can be compared to BibTeX without the quirks that BibTeX derived from TeX.

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up vote 4 down vote

Rather than answering your question directly, I'll propose an alternative tactic. As we see with library metadata inching towards semantic web technologies, we're realizing that pre-agreement on standards and formatting among different communities is indeed *IM*practical. The lesson therefore is that our investment in the standards might be better made in technologies that allow the domain differences to effectively work together. Rather than spend lots of time defining the "right" way, spend that time understanding how several fit-for-purpose ways can interoperate. I'd like to think that same principle would apply to citation styles.

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