I recently had someone ask for guidance on a preferred citation style when inputting bibliographic references into the IPT. They noted that there is guidance for datasets citation and the colophon in the IPT manual might show what GBIF would prefer, but it remains unclear if there is a preference. They asked for CSL or a reference to a standard (e.g. MLA).
Does GBIF have a preference?
We use (let’s call it) low-ink Harvard. No need for lots of extra commas and periods.
I think the standard Harvard reference for the IPT manual (since you mention it) would look like:
Wieczorek, J. & Braak, K. (2023). The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit User Manual, version 2.5. Copenhagen: GBIF Secretariat. GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) User Manual :: GBIF IPT User Manual
We drop the extra twiddly bits, which are really not needed for clarity:
Wieczorek J & Braak K (2023) The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit User Manual, version 2.5. Copenhagen: GBIF Secretariat. GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) User Manual :: GBIF IPT User Manual
Thanks for the quick answer, I’ll add “twiddly bits” to my technical lexicon 
Is there a proper CSL for it? Checklistbank serves references in CSL-JSON which can be styled in any format as long as there is a CSL style. We use APA 7 as the default, but could consider to move to the GBIF variation of Harvard
After thinking about it some more, I have an additional question, with the caveat that I don’t have a deep understanding of metadata harvesting.
The EML bibliography that comes out of the IPT has a single element for each reference, citation, with the identifier as an attribute. If the citation text was more predictably formatted, or broken into child-elements, do you think would it help strengthen the linkage between the dataset and the cited literature? Or would the difference be negligible?
We are working on adopting a newer version of EML which natively allows to share structured citation lists: 4 What’s New in EML 2.2.0 | Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
When that is integrated into the IPT it would indeed help. Though the strongest integration for sure is the DOI.
Makes sense, thanks!
Just adding a reference. The person who asked me about this found a CSL through Zotero’s CSL Search by Example tool. It seems to be a pretty close match: Style Info
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