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Foundations

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Standards

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Flagship messages

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Tools

Citation — Bibliographic reference in FHIR

The FHIR analogue of a PubMed or Cochrane reference: title, authors, abstract, DOI/PMID identifiers, journal. Building block of the Evidence-Based Medicine module.

Purpose of the resource

Citation is new in R5. It represents a structured bibliographic reference — scientific article, clinical guideline, book, dataset — with rich metadata (title, authors, journal, dates, DOI, PMID, abstract, MeSH terms). It is designed to feed the Evidence and EvidenceReport resources of the Evidence-Based Medicine module, as well as Cochrane-style systematic reviews.

Key fields

FieldTypeCardinalityRole
urluri0..1Canonical URL.
identifierIdentifier[]0..*DOI, PMID, ISBN.
versionstring0..1Version.
titlestring0..1Title.
statuscode1..1draft | active | retired | unknown.
experimentalboolean0..1Test flag.
datedateTime0..1Citation date.
publisherstring0..1Publisher of the FHIR Citation.
summaryBackboneElement[]0..*Styled summaries (Vancouver, AMA…).
classificationBackboneElement[]0..*Classifications (article type, MeSH).
noteAnnotation[]0..*Annotations.
currentStateCodeableConcept[]0..*Current state (in-press, retracted).
statusDateBackboneElement[]0..*Status evolution dates.
relatedArtifactRelatedArtifact[]0..*Related artefacts.
citedArtifactBackboneElement0..1Rich block describing the cited work (identifiers, titles, abstract, publicationForm, contributorship, classification, statusDate).

JSON example

json citation-example.json 
{
  "resourceType": "Citation",
  "id": "example-citation",
  "url": "http://example.org/Citation/citation-pmid-12345678",
  "identifier": [{
    "system": "urn:ietf:rfc:3986",
    "value": "10.1056/NEJMoa2034577"
  }],
  "status": "active",
  "experimental": false,
  "title": "BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine in Health Care Workers",
  "citedArtifact": {
    "identifier": [{
      "system": "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov",
      "value": "33301246"
    }],
    "title": [{
      "text": "BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine in Health Care Workers"
    }],
    "abstract": [{
      "text": "Randomized phase 3 trial of BNT162b2 in adult participants."
    }],
    "publicationForm": [{
      "publishedIn": {
        "title": "New England Journal of Medicine"
      },
      "publishedDate": "2020-12-31"
    }],
    "contributorship": {
      "entry": [{
        "contributor": {
          "type": "Person",
          "display": "Polack FP"
        }
      }]
    }
  }
}

Common pitfalls

  • DOI without system — use urn:ietf:rfc:3986 or a normalised URI.
  • Authors in free text — prefer the contributorship.entry structure.
  • Retracted article not flagged — use currentState = retracted with statusDate.