How to cite this digital edition?

Citing and referencing is an important aspect of scholarship as it makes research processes retraceable and transparent. Over centuries citation practices have been optimized for print publications. However, the digital revolution and the increased scholarly output online provide new challenges. For instance, the physical form of the book which was the basis for citation styles in the past is replaces by different types of online resources of which only some resemble books. Another issue is that digital resources on the internet are not as durable as printed books that are distributed in multiple copies in libraries across the world. For scholarly citation this is a problem as a website referenced today, might not be available tomorrow or might have changed its address which is frequently used for referencing. Editions, in print or digital, are supposed to be stable reference points for scholarly discourse as discussions the scholarly community engages today should still be reproducible in 50 or 100 years – as it is the case with printed scholarly editions from the 19th century. Consequently, assurance of long-term availability of resources and clarity of how and what to cite in a digital edition is vital. That the lack of providing this kind of assurance and information makes online resources less attractive for citation has been shown in a recently published survey using as a case study British History Online and Early English Books Online. The survey assessed if researchers prefer to cite print or digital resources and the results indicate that there is still a very strong culture of non-citation of electronic resources among students and researchers in the humanities. The authors of the study suggest that creators of web content can contribute to facilitate the citation of digital resources by providing recommendations on how to cite a resource and by having a solid permalink strategy .The following study tries to explore this topic further. After a brief introduction and discussion of the key issues of digital citation such as broken links and strategies to provide persistent identifiers for the citation and access of online content, the results of a survey of 100 digital scholarly editions will be presented. The survey focuses on citation recommendations provided and permalink strategies used by digital scholarly editions. In this context the paper will look at how permalink/PID strategies and citation recommendations can make digital editions better citable. A closer look will be taken at citation recommendations of selected editions in order to highlight possible solutions.