Labshake Product citation service

We offer a free service for lab suppliers to display up-to-date product citations on their own websites. View this demo to see how it works.

Following are the steps to use our product citation service:

Find supplier ID(s)

On labshake.com, citation are collected only for suppliers that are already indexed. Search indexed suppliers to find the ID of a supplier. This ID is required to use our product citation service.

If you are a manufacturer, you need to find the ID of your company. If your company has not been indexed, please contact us to add your company to our database. There is no charge to have your company indexed.

If you are a distributor who distributes products of many different suppliers, you need to find the ID of each supplier. Please contact us to get the IDs of the list of suppliers you need.

Integrate product citation service to your website

Add the following HTML code to your web page where product citations are to be displayed:


                <div id="labshake-citation">

                    <a href="https://labshake.com/supplier/supplier_id/citation?q=query" class="ref-link">

                        citation_title

                    </a>

                </div>

Then add the following to the end of your web page:


                ...

                        <script src="https://static.labshake.com/js/citation_api.js"></script>

                    </body>

                </html>

Replace supplier_id with your company's supplier ID.
Replace query with the product name or product number, or the concatnation of product name(s) and product number(s) separated by "|".

Enclose the product name or product number with double quotes for full phrase matching (case insensitive). This is strongly recommended, otherwise citations for other products with partially matched product names or numbers will also be displayed.

Make sure to URL encode the query to escape special characters.

The maximum length of query is 256 characters. Characters exceeding 256 will be truncated.

If query is not specified, all citations by the supplier will be displayed, ordered by publication year with latest citations displayed first.

Example:

For a product named "MinElute PCR Purification Kit" that has two product numbers: "28006" and "28004", the proper query should be:

q=quote_plus('"MinElute PCR Purification Kit"|"28006"|"28004"')

Citations that have exact matches (case insensitive) for "MinElute PCR Purification Kit", or "28006", or "28004" will be displayed. Replace "quote_plus" with the respective url encoding function in your programming language.

If you would like to have citations that partially match "MinElute PCR Purification Kit" to be displayed too, the query should be:

q=quote_plus('MinElute PCR Purification Kit|"28006"|"28004"')

Note in this case that all citations containing words like "PCR", "Purification Kit" will be displayed, ordered by matching score.
Replace citation_title with the proper title for the citations. For example "Related citations", "Product references", etc. When the citations are loaded, the citation_title will appear on top of the list of cited publications.

Optional parameters

The following optional parameters can also be used to refine the result:

years: the number of years of citations to return counting backwards from the current year. It can be a value between 1 and 6. The default value is 6.
size: the number of matched citations to be displayed. It can be a value between 1 and 10. The default value is 10.

How it works

After the page is loaded, the javascript searches for the DIV element with ID "labshake-citation". Then based on the URL provided in the link, it calls the product citation service on labshake.com to fetch citations related to the referred product. Then:

If citations are found, the citations are displayed inside this DIV element, with citation_title shown on top. The link is removed.
If no citations are found, "N/A" is displayed inside this DIV element. with citation_title shown on top. The link is removed.
When no citations are found, the "class" attribute of the DIV element is set to "not-available". This allows the option to hide the DIV element when no citations are available. View "Custom CSS Styling" for more detail.
If any error occured when fetching the citations, the DIV element remains unchanged.

Custom CSS styling

The citations are loaded into the DIV with ID "labshake-citation". You can apply custom CSS styling so that the citations displayed are in styles consistent with the rest of your web page.

You can inspect the HTML source loaded by the product citation service, find the CSS class for each element, then apply CSS rules accordingly.

The following is the CSS used on the demo page.

/* include this rule to hide the citation link initially for better user experience. Otherwise the link will show then suddenly disappear*/ 
#labshake-citation .ref-link {
    display: none;
}

/* enable this rule to not display anything when no product citations are found. */
#labshake-citation.not-available {
/*    display: none; */
}

/* rule for citation title */
#labshake-citation .header {
    font-size: 20px;
    font-weight: 300;
}

#labshake-citation li {
    margin-top: 0.5em;
}

#labshake-citation .journal {
    font-style: italic;
}

#labshake-citation .quote {
    font-style: italic;
}

/* make the matched keywords stand out */
#labshake-citation .quote em {
    font-weight: bold;
}

#labshake-citation .footer {
    margin-top: 1em;
    font-style: italic;
}

Performance

Integrating Labshake product citation service does not affect your page loading time. Since the javascript is loaded at the end of your webpage, and the citations are loaded after your page is loaded. Also the javascript added to your web page is a tiny file without any external dependencies, and does not load any other javascripts. It works on all browsers that support AJAX.

Loading of citations of a product is very fast, it usually takes less than 0.5 second. This offers a very smooth experience for users visiting web pages using our product citation service.

If for any reason the citations fail to load, your web page will remain unchanged. That means even if our website is down, your website will not be affected.

Other notes

Currently we collect citations only from bioRxiv.
By default only the first 10 best matched citations are displayed. If over 10 citations are found, a link "View all references on labshake.com " appears at the end of the list of citations, this link points to all the citations of your product on labshake.com; otherwise, a link "Sponsored by labshake.com" will show instead. This link points to labshake.com home page.

Feedback