引用方法

Why Bencao Dian is citable

Every entry on Bencao Dian has a permanent URL, every classical quotation is tagged with chapter and section, every term follows the Wiseman / Practical Dictionary standard, every substantive revision is recorded in a public errata log, and the entire corpus is published under the named "Bencaodian Editorial" byline. These are the basic preconditions for a reference work to be cited in academic papers, clinical notes, teaching materials, doctoral dissertations, and legal filings — not marketing language.

See Editorial Standards.

Canonical URL pattern

All entry URLs take the shape:
https://bencaodian.org/<locale>/<type>/<slug>
where <locale> is en or zh; <type> is one of herbs, formulas, patterns, acupoints, meridians, texts, or concepts; and <slug> is the stable identifier for the entry (hyphenated pinyin).

Example: https://bencaodian.org/en/herbs/gan-cao

Citation templates

The examples below use the entry for Gān Cǎo (甘草, Licorice Root). Substitute the slug, year, and access date as appropriate.

@misc{bencaodian-gan-cao,
  author       = {{Bencaodian Editorial}},
  title        = {Gān Cǎo 甘草 (Glycyrrhizae Radix et Rhizoma)},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {Bencao Dian: A Bilingual Knowledge Graph of Traditional Chinese Medicine},
  url          = {https://bencaodian.org/en/herbs/gan-cao},
  note         = {CC BY-SA 4.0}
}

A “Cite this entry” block at the bottom of every page provides one-click copy for each format pre-filled for that entry.

Citing the dataset as a whole

If your research uses the seed dataset as a whole (rather than a single entry), please cite the dataset itself:

Bencaodian Editorial. Bencao Dian: A Bilingual Knowledge Graph of Traditional Chinese Medicine [Dataset]. Version 1. https://bencaodian.org/about/data. CC BY-SA 4.0.