User:Boghog/sandbox

This template is used to create citations for articles in journals. It is an alternative to cite journal that instead formats authors according to the Vancouver system. This author format is documented in:

In all other respects, this template is identical to cite journal. Both are based on Module:Citation/CS1 and use identical parameters. The only difference is in how the authors are rendered.

Default parameter settings
This template achieves Vancouver author format by changing the default settings for the following parameters to:

Note: While the National Library of Medicine now lists all authors, the original ICMJE recommendations state "List the first six authors followed by et al." The default 6 setting follows the ICMJE recommendation.

Optional vauthors parameter
This template adds support for an optional vauthors parameter that generates clean author metadata in the HTML output (see COinS) while avoiding the character overhead of explicit firstn, lastn parameters. The vauthors parameter is also fully compatible with author-link and display-authors parameters.

Parameter explanations

 * vauthors: Author list formatted in Vancouver style (comma separated list). This concatenated author list is automatically split internally by the template into the individual authors' first and last names that are respectively assigned to sequential first1, last1, first2, last2,  ... parameters. This parameter is also checked for formatting errors (should not contain semicolons or periods, neither of which conforms to the Vancouver system).  If such an error is detected, a vauthors error message is appended to the rendered citation.


 * other parameters: Refer to the documentation in cite journal.

Usage
Single vauthors parameter (recommended):

"author1, author2, ..." parameters:

"first1, last1, first2, last2, ..." parameters:

Rationale
The two main advantages of vauthors are efficiency and consistency.

Efficiency
The purpose of citations is to support the corresponding text. If a citation has a large number authors, the use of explicit first1, last1, first2, last2, ... parameters in cite journal becomes unwieldy and starts to overwhelm the surrounding wiki text. The author format in the Vancouver system is both efficient (requires fewer characters) and accurate (it is easy to parse since it is comma delimited). For citations a large number of authors, this template permits a significant reduction in both the length of the displayed citation as well as the size of the imbedded template.

According to WP:MEDREF, medical articles should be relatively dense with inline citations. At the same time, there has been a steady increase in the average number of authors in citations in the biomedical and physical sciences. Citations with "hyperauthorship" (authors in excess of 50) are becoming increasingly common. Because of the number and size of citations, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate and edit prose within wiki text. The use of a compact author format may be useful in these situations.

Alternatives are to use cite pmid, cite doi, etc. templates, but the use of these templates per consensus has been deprecated. List defined references is another alternative, but the disadvantage of this approach is that it separates the text and citation which is used to support the text.

Consistency
firstn imposes few restrictions on how first names stored and displayed. The first name parameter may or may not include middle names, may be spelled out in full or use initials, and if initials are used may or may not include periods and may or may not contain a space between the first and middle initials. In contrast vauthors imposes strict restrictions on how first names are stored and displayed. The first name can only be one (first name initial) or two (first + middle initial). In short, the use of vauthors insures that author name are consistently formatted throughout an article.

Tools
Wikipedia template filling: Converts PubMed ID or PubMed Central ID to a full citation.