Posted on 28 October 2015 by BaerbelW

If you are a long-time reader of Skeptical Science you'll be aware of the glossary functionality which automatically displays definitions of scientific terms when you have the cursor hover above an underlined term. This neat functionality was created and announced by Bob Lacatena and went live in February 2013.

The Skeptical Science team has had on and off discussions about the need for a kind of bibliography for all the scientific papers we regularly reference in our blog posts and rebuttals. During one of these discussions Phil mentioned that it would be nice to have the relevant reference immediately displayed in a pop-up-box. And so, the penny dropped and we realised that we already had this functionality available at Skeptical Science: the glossary!

I went ahead and did a quick test to see if the idea could work out and added an entry for Cook et al. (2013) to the glossary. Once the entry had been added and a page found where the spelling of the "term" - i.e. the reference - fitted the glossary entry, this immediately worked as intended and the citation was displayed in the right-hand margin of the page as soon as the cursor hovered above the reference:

You should be able to test this yourself with the above reference to our consensus study. Hover the cursor above it and see what happens! If it doesn't work, check your glossary settings via the "Look up a Term" panel shown at the bottom of this page:

We are adding the references at the "Beginner" level, so please make sure that the relevant box is checked if you'd like to see them immediately:

You can also use the glossary's control panel to search for a specific citation by keying in the reference or parts of it:

Lastly, there is also the Climate Glossary menu option (under Resources) which will allow you to browse and investigate the entire glossary.

As we only just "discovered" this way to leverage the glossary's functionality, there are only some references available yet which I've started to enter based on our Denial101x references. As time goes by, you'll see references displayed more and more often in the right-hand margin and we hope that you like this new feature!

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