referim

Referim is an open standard and protocol for managing bibliographic references and citations across documents, repositories, and publishing platforms. It provides a common data model and vocabulary for describing bibliographic items, their relationships, and their provenance, enabling seamless linking between in-text citations, reference lists, and source materials.

The core data model covers works, authors, identifiers, metadata fields, citation relationships, and versioning. It supports interoperability with existing formats such as CSL-JSON, BibTeX, RIS, and MARC, and promotes the use of persistent identifiers like DOIs and ORCID. A Referim API enables querying, updating, and validating records, and a lightweight serialization format facilitates data exchange between systems.

History of Referim traces to a collaborative effort among academic libraries, publishers, and research institutions in the late 2010s. After community review, the specification was published and governance moved to an open model with working groups and a steering committee. Adoption has grown in some journals and institutional repositories, particularly for cross-platform citation and reference management.

Features of Referim include cross-platform citation linking, metadata enrichment through external databases, provenance tracking, support for offline workflows, and easy export of bibliographic data for manuscript editors and publishers.

Governance and adoption are based on open participation with libraries, publishers, and academic consortia contributing to ongoing maintenance. Adoption varies by discipline and institution, and interoperability with legacy systems remains a practical challenge, but the standard aims to improve data portability, reproducibility, and discoverability.

See also: Citation style language, CSL-JSON, BibTeX, RIS, DOI, ORCID.