Stream: social
Topic: FHIR citation?
Stian Soiland-Reyes (Apr 27 2021 at 15:00):
Hi, we are mentioning HL7 FHIR in a paper, and wonder what is the best academic citation to use? I could not find anything on the website, which of course is what we're referencing already now, but as a footnote.
The best citation I found so far is https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/HL7-FHIR%3A-An-Agile-and-RESTful-approach-to-exchange-Bender-Sartipi/1303cba4966df8aefb696b288ba06e1438f3d109 from 2013, that talks about the beginning of FHIR - is there something more recent I should use?
John Moehrke (Apr 27 2021 at 15:10):
http://hl7.org/fhir/overview.html
John Moehrke (Apr 27 2021 at 16:53):
https://www.healthit.gov/topic/standards-technology/standards/fhir-fact-sheets
David Pyke (Apr 27 2021 at 17:05):
I prefer those, they were written by a top mind in the industry (but I may be bias in that statement)
Grahame Grieve (Apr 27 2021 at 19:57):
@Wayne Kubick we should have a formal answer for this
Stian Soiland-Reyes (Apr 28 2021 at 10:12):
Well, those pages are nice, but I was thinking of a publication in a journal or conference.. there are several papers showing specific things they have done with FHIR but it would be wrong to cite them. And so much has happened with FHIR since that 2013 outline!
Elliot Silver (Apr 28 2021 at 18:00):
Has ANSI published FHIR as a US standard? Would that solve your reference issue? I know it isn't an academic citation, but it would at least be a single fixed document you could point to.
Lloyd McKenzie (Apr 28 2021 at 18:07):
Technically, ANSI has only published the bits that are normative.
David Pyke (Apr 28 2021 at 18:10):
Google Scholar has lots of publications. Did you need it in a specific area or are you looking for an overview
Grahame Grieve (Apr 28 2021 at 23:02):
@Brian Alper since we're talking about citations, what is the right way to cite the FHIR specification?
John Moehrke (Apr 29 2021 at 11:29):
I find it quite unusual the need to use a Journal article for a ANSI approved standard. The FHIR standard has received more review than any Journal article every will.
John Moehrke (Apr 29 2021 at 11:31):
do we need to get you the PDF reference that is filed with ANSI? (I just last week learned that HL7 still must commit to PDF the submission given to ANSI). -- draconian
Brian Alper (Apr 29 2021 at 20:48):
@Grahame Grieve We have developed 2 FHIR Citation Resource instances to cite the "FHIR 4.0.1 specification" and the "FHIR Current Build specification". This shows use of Citation Resource for detailed citation data. Meanwhile the original ask was for a "Citation Summary" to show how to cite the FHIR specification. There are more than 10,000 styles of citation summaries, and we provide here the Computable Publishing style.
Citation Resource https://fevir.net/resources/Citation/174 will show the full detail and suggests a Computable Publishing style automatically with:
FHIR Release #4 [Standard], version 4.0.1. Contributors: Many individuals and organizations (1000s) contribute to the FHIR specification through many roles: see http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/credits.html. In: HL7.org. Published October 30, 2019. Accessed April 29, 2021. Available at: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/. Computable resource at: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/fhir-spec.zip.
Citation Resource https://fevir.net/resources/Citation/176 will show the style with:
FHIR Current Development build [Standard], version (last commit). Contributors: Many individuals and organizations (1000s) contribute to the FHIR specification through many roles: see http://build.fhir.org/credits.html. In: HL7.org. Accessed April 29, 2021. Available at: http://build.fhir.org/. Computable resource at: http://build.fhir.org/fhir-spec.zip.
If the use of the citation is in an article for publication in a specific journal, the journal policies may dictate a different style for how to display the citation. But the data that would be used to support that citation style can be found in the Citation Resource.
Anyway the Citation Viewer and Citation Builder that you will see in the links above is under construction so the Text View is not 100% yet while the JSON View should give you the accurate FHIR Citation.
Josh Mandel (Apr 29 2021 at 20:54):
Some relevant thoughts (in the context of ISO) at https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/47.html -- it'd be nice for HL7 to provide examples. It'd also be nice if we had a DOI for FHIR releases.
Brian Alper (Apr 29 2021 at 22:01):
Cite FHIR with FHIR.
Grahame Grieve (Apr 29 2021 at 22:33):
So my intention is to do a technical correction to the published final versions of the spec (R2, R3, and R4) and put some thing like "To Cite this specification, use the following: xxx" at the bottom of the home page.
This full citation:
FHIR Release #4 [Standard], version 4.0.1. Contributors: Many individuals and organizations (1000s) contribute to the FHIR specification through many roles: see http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/credits.html. In: HL7.org. Published October 30, 2019. Accessed April 29, 2021. Available at: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/. Computable resource at: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/fhir-spec.zip.
This seems to contain unnecessary details to me. I'd rather have:
FHIR Release #4 [Standard], version 4.0.1. Contributors: HL7 and its participants (http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/credits.html). In: HL7.org. Published October 30, 2019. Available at: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/.
Josh Mandel (Apr 29 2021 at 22:38):
(But nix the ' in "its")
Brian Alper (Apr 29 2021 at 23:50):
I modified https://fevir.net/resources/Citation/174 to
FHIR Release #4 [Standard], version 4.0.1. Contributors: HL7 and its participants (http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/credits.html). In: HL7.org. Published October 30, 2019. Available at: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/.
and https://fevir.net/resources/Citation/176 to
FHIR Current Development build [Standard], version (last commit). Contributors: HL7 and its participants (http://build.fhir.org/credits.html). In: HL7.org. Available at: http://build.fhir.org/.
You can set the style to any form you choose. We just created an autogenerated style off of the data in the Citation Resource.
Lloyd McKenzie (Apr 30 2021 at 00:20):
Do we need Release #4 in addition to version 4.0.1? I would go with:
FHIR [Standard], version 4.0.1
Lloyd McKenzie (Apr 30 2021 at 00:20):
References to the CI build would have to specify a date-time
Brian Alper (Apr 30 2021 at 01:17):
The distinction between title concepts (Release #4) and versions (4.0.1) is challenging. In many situations the versions of an article are variations of the "main thing" and not the primary concept being expressed. But if the desire is to cite R4 as distinct from R5 is that different than the distinctions of versions? It can be argued either way, and if you are setting a "To cite this specification, use the following:" then you can set it for what you think is most meaningful.
You can include "Date accessed <Date>" in the suggested citation for the CI build. I had that in the earlier example above. You just wouldn't want to suggest the actual date in your proposed citation unless it automatically loaded with the current date.
Lloyd McKenzie (Apr 30 2021 at 01:24):
I'd be more comfortable with FHIR R4 as a name than "FHIR Release #4", but I think avoiding redundancy (and possible confusion) is probably best.
David Pyke (Apr 30 2021 at 12:58):
http://build.fhir.org/citation.html
Stian Soiland-Reyes (Apr 30 2021 at 16:22):
That's exactly it, @David Pyke there's just too many more specialized publications after that 2013 one, but there is none I can find pulling them together. We're going to stick with citing hl7.org for now I think (we are just mentioning FHIR as an example of using PROV in healthcare). This is for a paper about ISO~23494 provenance model for Biotechnology btw, so while stating the ANSI standard might be good that might also miss out other things that is easier found on website. Mind you can cite both!
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
