Challenges and Requirements of Persian Language Support in Citation Software

Recent researches showed the inaccurate citations' situation in Iran. Researchers' unawareness of reference management software (citation management software, or bibliographic management software) was one of the main reasons for this situation. However, the current software does not have proper support for the Persian language; one reason is the lack of necessary requirements for software implementation and development. A similar problem can also be seen in the bilingual citations to articles on many scientific Iranian journal websites. The purpose of this study is to investigate the problems of localization of reference management software in Persian and to provide operational solutions.

The research method was narrative review and included reviewing several international and domestic citation management software and investigation of their requirements to support other languages. Ability for right to left typesetting of references, using synonyms of specific words, having Persian and English references at the same time, and the precedence of Persian references when sorting the references are among the requirements that a citation management software must have to support Persian.

In order to adapt the conventional international citation programs for use in Persian, new information fields -including language, langid, origlanguage and doclanguage - that are compatible with modern software should be considered. Some other challenges such as Persian labels, transliteration, romanization and bilingual citation reports for Persian articles are also investigated which are mentioned in the text of the article. Also, according to the proposed fields, it is recommended to export bilingual bibliographic information in scientific websites separately for each language.

Without agreement and development of the necessary requirements, it is not possible to program and use Persian citation styles in a universal way. These requirements can be pursued and enacted nationally and internationally to be included in reference management software, journal websites, and scientific databases.