Open data and citation

Every person's page and thesis page has a twin a program can read, in schema.org's shared vocabulary, and a citation to copy. Search engines are offered the pages of people with students and of theses that name a supervisor.

A person's page and the same page as schema.org data, which names the person and links them, through sameAs, to the registers that know them: here an ORCID iD read on their thesis record, and the Wikidata item and OpenAlex author record that state them.

A page and its data

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for describing things on the web, kept by the search engines together and read by them, by library catalogues and by any program that wants to know what a page is about. It names kinds of thing, such as a Person, a Thesis or an Organization, and the properties each can have, such as a name, an author or a date. A page written in it says, in a form a program can rely on, what a reader sees in words.

Every person's page and every thesis's page on the site carries such a description, and the same description has an address of its own: add /jsonld to the page's address. It is made from the same answer the page is drawn from, so it names the same people, moves when the page moves, and is refused when the page is, for a person who asked not to be shown.

A person's description is a profile page whose subject is the person: their name, a sentence of what the record holds of them, the year Wikidata gives for their birth where it gives one, the school of their doctorate, their own theses, each at its page here, and the day of the newest reading of the record behind it. Schema.org gives a Person no property for an advisor or a student, so the person's description claims neither. The lineage is said where schema.org has room for it, on the thesis.

A thesis's description names its title, its year where the record gives one, the repository's own page for it, the school, and the author. Everyone else the record names, a supervisor, a committee member or an examiner, is listed as a contributor in a Role: schema.org's way of saying that a person took part in a work in a named capacity. The Role says the part in words, such as supervisor, and the kind of evidence behind it, such as a thesis repository's record, and holds the person with the address of their page.

A thesis as schema.org data: the Thesis names its author as a Person and its school as an Organization, and lists everyone else its record names as a Role in contributor, which says the part they took and the kind of evidence behind it, and holds the Person.

A program that wants more than one page at a time asks the record at the addresses on the page for developers, and an assistant can ask the record too (your assistant and the record).

The registers a person is linked to

Scholars are known to many registers at once: ORCID, which a researcher holds for themselves; Wikidata; OpenAlex, an open index of papers and their authors; library authorities such as VIAF, the German National Library's GND and France's IdRef; and others. A person's description lists their address at each register in sameAs, schema.org's property for another page about the same person.

Only the links a source stands behind go in: an identifier Wikidata states for the person, one a repository's thesis record gives, one an OpenAlex author record holds, or a match that was checked and confirmed. A match that is only likely, not confirmed, is shown on the page in those words and left out of the data, since sameAs says who the person is. The page's own list of registers says where each link was read. A person the record links to none is offered searches of the registers by their name, which are no link and are never in the data. How a person is told apart from their namesakes is on who is who.

Citing a page

Every person's page and thesis page has a part to cite it, in BibTeX, for LaTeX, and in APA style, each copied by one press. The author is the site, the title the page's own, the address the page's one address, and the date the day the record behind the page was last read from its sources. The record changes as sources are read again, so the citation says the day it stood as cited; the address shows the record as it stands now, not as it stood then. In APA a person's page reads like this, the day here an example:

Academic Ancestry. (2026, October 16). Marie Curie: Advisors and students [Read on 2026-10-16]. https://academicancestry.org/person/Q7186

and in BibTeX, as a misc entry with its address:

@misc{academicancestry_Q7186,
  author = {{Academic Ancestry}},
  title = {{Marie Curie: advisors and students}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://academicancestry.org/person/Q7186},
  note = {read on 2026-10-16}
}

Where a link rests on a source, cite the source as well: the thesis page names the repository and links to its own page for the thesis.

What search engines are offered

A person's page is offered to search engines where the record or Wikidata holds a student of the person, and a thesis's page where its record names a supervisor. Every other page is marked not to be indexed, though it can still be followed from page to page. Each offered page names its data's address in its head, so a search engine finds the description beside the page.

The sitemaps, the lists a search engine reads to find a site's pages, list the people offered and are drawn again each night; the theses whose pages are offered are being added to them. Once a person who asked not to be shown is taken off, their page and its data say they are gone, and a search engine's own copy lasts until it visits again (the privacy notice says how to ask).